Science Friday - mRNA Research Wins Nobel Prize & Lightning On Venus

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

An mRNA Advance Wins A Nobel PrizeThis week, a handful of scientists scattered around the world got surprise telephone calls announcing that they will be receiving Nobel Prizes. On Monday, the prize in medicine or physiology was announced. It went to Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, scientists who developed the modifications to mRNA that made the biomolecule a viable strategy for creating vaccines. On Tuesday, the Nobel in physics went to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier, who created techniques to illuminate the movement of electrons using attosecond-length pulses of light. And on Wednesday  Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov learned that they had won the prize in chemistry for their work with tiny bits of semiconductor material known as quantum dots.Umair Irfan, staff writer at Vox, joins guest host Flora Lichtman to talk about the winners and their advances, and to share other stories from the week in science, including an FCC fine for a satellite company’s space junk, concerns over drought in the Amazon rainforest, and a tale of fighting a coral-threatening algal bloom using hungry crabs. Venus Lightning Debate Gets LitVenus is an inhospitable place. The longest any spacecraft has survived on the planet’s surface is thought to be around two hours. It’s blazing hot. It has bone-crushing atmospheric pressure and clouds made of sulfuric acid. But is there lightning?Flybys of Venus have detected electromagnetic signals in the radio spectrum called “whistler waves” that, on Earth, are associated with lightning strikes. So some experts speculated that Venus might have lightning too—perhaps a lot of lightning. But there was no hard proof. The question of Venusian lightning has been a topic of electric debate among scientists for some 40 years.A study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters last month used data from the Parker Solar Probe to argue that the whistler waves around Venus may have a different cause. Research scientist Dr. Harriet George and space plasma physicist Dr. David Malaspina of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder join guest host Flora Lichtman to talk about the finding, and what it could tell us about planets elsewhere in the galaxy.   To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hi, Ira here. A lot of you have said, hey, Ira, we like the podcast, but sometimes we just want to listen to one story at a time. And we hear you. So we're going to try something new. A topic or two a day spread out through Monday through Science Friday. Have a listen. It's been a highly charged debate for around 40 years. Does Venus have lightning? This is really going against what we really thought these whistle waves were telling us. So it is a bit of a surprise to everyone involved. of it. It's Friday, October 6th, and today is Science Friday. I'm SciFri producer Charles Berkist. The planet Venus has blazing hot temperatures, bone crushing pressures, and sulfuric acid clouds. The longest any spacecraft has survived on the surface is thought to be around two hours. But if you went to that dangerous place, would you have to worry about lightning? New research takes on that question and we'll talk about it. But first, we check in on some of the

Science News with Flora Lickman. This week, one of the rituals of science, an early morning wake-up call for scientists scattered around the world. Biomedical folks on Monday, physicists on Tuesday, chemists on Wednesday, it's Nobel Prize Week. Joining me to talk about the winners and some other stories from the week in science is Umer Erfahn, staff writer at Box. He's based in Washington, D.C.

Welcome back, Umer. Hi, Flora. How's it going? Good. Okay, so let's dive into the prizes and let's start with medicine. Who won? The winners this year were Catalan Carrico and Drew Weissman. These were the scientists that developed the modifications to make mRNA into a viable strategy for vaccines. I think at this point, most of us are familiar with the impact of this work. So it stands to make a lot of sense that they were awarded for this research. This was the key to the COVID vaccines.

That's right. So compared to conventional vaccines, those are vaccines that typically use fragments of viruses. that are introduced to the body, the MRI vaccine rather uses instructions for making a part of the virus. That makes it a lot more versatile and faster in terms of development. The challenge with MRNA, though, is that it's a very fragile molecule that a lot of our body's defenses destroy it very easily. It degrades very rapidly. And so the challenge is trying to make sure that it can actually be delivered intact and then be disposed of after it's done its job. I read that it took some convincing to get people on board with this technology, like that they'd been working on this for a very long time?

That's right. You know, this is obviously a long-running process, decades of research. The challenge, though, is that with vaccines, because they're administered to so many people around the world, the standard for performance is actually very, very high, and a lot of people really did not want to upset the conventional techniques that basically, in order to do something different, the new technique had to be a lot better

and prove itself to meet the same standards or exceed them. Yeah, it's hard to break the mold. I mean, I love this prize because it's very personal to me. It's inside of me. I feel like it's less abstract than sometimes the Nobel Prizes can be. What about the physics prize? The prize in physics this year went to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krautz, and Anne-Louis. These were scientists that developed a technique to illuminate subatomic particles.

Basically, they were using strobe lights or very tiny pulses of laser light measured in attoseconds. This is one quintillionth of a second. And by flashing light very, very quickly, they could image electrons. It's almost like they developed the flash on the camera that can take pictures of electrons. Right. Like, just imagine the most high-speed camera that you could use at a subatomic level to take pictures of these particles. The technique is now used to help advance fundamental science, just basically understanding the basic physics of electrons. But in the future, scientists say that it could help us develop better materials, better electronics, better batteries, and potentially medical diagnostics as well.

Let's go to the Chemistry Prize. Yeah, the Chemistry Award this year went to three scientists, Mungi Boendi, Louis Bru and Alexei Ekimov. These scientists developed quantum dots. Quantum dots are very tiny bits of semiconductor material, just about a few nanometers across. The unique trait, though, is that they effectively can confine electrons. And once you can sort of bottle up an electron, you can do a lot of interesting things with it. They can do a lot of interesting experiments, but we're already seeing quantum dots being deployed for their unique lighting on electric properties.

They're things that can be used in developing LCD and LED displays in televisions and things like that. But they can also be used to make things like more efficient solar panels. So I might have quantum dots around me right now. I would not know that for certain. I mean, depending on what kind of device and how expensive it is that you're looking at, I don't know how sophisticated the computer you're working on is. Never mind. It's probably not a quantum dot then.

But again, part of it is that it's cheap. And that means that it could be ubiquitous quickly. Okay. In more applied technology, a fine for space littering. Tell me about that. Right. If you were hoping that you could just dump your garbage in space and hope no one would notice, the Federal Communications Commission wants everyone to know that they're paying attention. Just this week, the FCC, they handed out their first of a kind fine for basically space littering. This was handed out to DISH Network for failing to uphold what they called a debris mitigation plan.

Basically, there's this old satellite that DISH Network operated and they were supposed to use their last remaining fuel to put it about 190 miles. above its current orbit, but they miscalculated and only got about 75 miles above that orbit, meaning that the satellite is still in an area where it could potentially collide with other satellites. The company now will have to pay a $150,000 fine. And the penalty is maybe a sign of things to come as low Earth orbit gets more crowded as we see more satellites being launched into space. The chances of collisions and damage and just junk being up there that can cause havoc is becoming a bigger concern. What does this mean for companies like SpaceX who are putting up tons and tons of Starlink

satellites? That's one of the big concerns looking forward. So the first generation of satellites, they were fairly big, discrete objects, and many of them are coming out on retirement age. But this new generation of small satellites, these microsatellites, that's even more concerning because they may not have the fuel to actually burn themselves up or get themselves out of the way of other satellites if there's a collision risk. And the worry is now that you have so many of these smaller satellites,

they're going to be much harder to dispose of when they do reach the ends of their lives. All right. Let's get back down to Earth. You have a story about how the electric grid fared this summer and how it may fare in the months ahead. Tell me about it. That's right. You know, just about everybody experienced a fairly hot summer this year. The United States saw its hottest July on record. and as everybody went inside and tried to cool off, they turned on their air conditioners, they turned on their fans, that pushed power demand to record high levels across the country. But in that period of record high electricity demand, for the most part, the U.S. didn't see blackouts. Now, the question is, is this a resounding victory or was this a narrowly avoided disaster? The experts that I talked to said it's a little bit of both that many grid operators were able to anticipate that the summer would be very hot. they were able to plan and procure extra power. But if you're in many parts of the country,

you may have gotten an alert from your power provider asking you to turn down electricity. It did actually get pretty dicey, and they had to issue emergency alerts to try to keep the lights on. So the U.S. narrowly avoided disaster this summer, and many grid operators are saying that they have to start paying attention now to what's going to happen this winter, because while demand may not be as high as the summer, electricity demand is rising in the wintertime as well. The big factors here are things like electric vehicles. We're seeing more of those plugging into the grid, but also people switching from gas to electric furnaces and stoves. So that's pushing up electricity demand.

Meanwhile, in the wintertime, there's less solar power on the grid. There's less wind power. And many power plants are scheduled for maintenance in the winter. So supplies constrained there as well. Speaking of electric vehicles, you have a story about electric school buses. Tell me about that news. Right. My colleague Rebecca Lieber has been following this story for a while.

Basically, the entire school bus fleet in the United States, roughly 500,000 buses over the next two decades are going to turn over. Basically, just about every one of them is going to be replaced. And these buses typically run on diesel engines. These diesel motors, they put out a lot of pollution. They smell bad. And this has been a target for a lot of communities for trying to clean up exposures for pollution for their children. One way of doing that is, of course, to electrify school buses, that basically turning them to run on electricity that can get rid of that pollution, but also save operating costs. The tradeoff, though, is that electric buses generally are more expensive than diesel buses.

And so it's been a tough sell for a lot of school districts that are, you know, short on money to switch over to electric buses just yet. Okay, zooming out, we've been hearing about extreme weather all over the world, but I read there's a, drought in the Amazon, which seems especially alarming given that the word rain is in rainforest. What's happening there? Right. There's a severe drought along the Amazon River, and it's having some pretty severe consequences just this week. People found 120 river dolphin corpses floating in one of the tributaries to the rivers. The Amazon River is also an important conduit. People use boats to traverse it. there are no bridges across the Amazon River. So when the water levels dip low, people actually end up stranded in many parts of the rainforest because they can't get around as easily. There are a few factors at play this year. The big one is just that it's been an exceptionally hot year. You know, we were just talking about a very hot summer here in North America. It was also a very hot winter at the same time in South America. You know, Brazil saw triple digit temperatures during its winter. And now it's heading into its spring and summer. So temperatures are going to get hot and stay hot. That means that there's going to be less water in the river as they enter their dry season.

But there's also the El Nino this year that tends to disrupt rainfall over the Amazon. And another factor is deforestation. Trees actually play an important role in cycling water in the Amazon rainforest in terms of generating its own rainfall. And as that tree cover gets depleted, that can also lead to less rainfall in other parts of the rainforest. And so we're seeing these long-term and short-term trends converging right now. Well, let's end on something a little bit more hopeful. You have a story about saving a coral reef with the aid of crabs. This sounds like the making of a Disney movie.

I think it's this making of an action movie. You know, scientists are training this crack team of crustaceans to rescue the coral reefs. They're being faced right now with record high water temperatures. The corals are bleaching. algae is spreading everywhere, and now it's up to these heroes in carapaces to eat that algae. And that's exactly the strategy that they're deploying here. So a team of scientists found that Caribbean king crabs, they eat seaweed at rates that exceed basically all other invertebrates. And they found that if you have just one crab on a reef, it has dramatic effects in terms of seaweed cover.

And that allows a coral to better populate, to better breathe, and to grow. and that helps them recover from these kinds of bleaching events very quickly. So what scientists are doing are, you know, raising these crabs in these laboratories in tanks, essentially, but also coaching them on how to survive in the real world before they send them there. And so they're basically trying to introduce some elements of the natural environment and also teaching them to be afraid of predators. And the way they do that is by putting hand puppets into the tank to try to scare the crabs. So they learn to avoid certain kinds of fish.

and then that way later this year, when they start putting these crabs into the reef, they'll be able to hit the ground running and actually get to work, saving the reef. Hit the ground crawling, yeah. This story has everything I want in a science story. Crustations, hand puppets. And I agree. I think you're right. Action movie.

Mission Unbleechable. I think we might have to workshop that title a little bit, but yes. Amerifon is a staff writer at Vox. He's based in Washington, D.C. Thanks for being with me today. My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Flora. Here on Earth, there are signs of lightning beyond just a flash in the sky. The lightning's effects show up in the radio spectrum at very low frequencies.

They're called whistler waves. No, that's not a Star Wars sound effect. This is the real sound of whistler waves collected by the Van Allen Probes mission near Earth. Thank you, NASA and the University of Iowa. Missions to Venus have detected whistler waves there too, and they were thought to be evidence of lightning. maybe a lot of lightning. But now a paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, based on data from the Parker Solar Probe, argues that the Whistler Waves on Venus

may have a different cause, throwing some cold water or hot sulfuric acid on the Venus has lightning theory. Joining me now to talk about that binding is research scientist Dr. Harriet George and space plasma physicist Dr. David Malaspina. They're both at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder. Welcome to the show. Hi, great to be here. Thank you. Harriet, is this finding, sending a jolt through the Venus researcher community? I do think it's been a little bit of a jolt. It's obviously been debated for quite a long time now. And this is really going against what we

really thought these whistle waves were telling us. So it is a bit of a surprise to everyone involved, I think. Are people in the lightning on Venus camp? Are they like shook by this? I'd say we've at startled, yes. So why is this a matter of hot debate? Why do people care about whether there's lightning on Venus? Well, there's a few reasons why we care. One of the first really big reasons is that lightning is very dangerous. We don't want to spend huge amounts of money to send a probe over to Venus,

just have it get hit by lightning and shore it out before it gives us the data that we need. So finding out if there's lightning, how much of it there is on Venus, is really important to protecting those space missions that could go over there. I feel like that's just one of many threats to any spacecraft on Venus. One of many, but it'd be one that it's nice not to deal with. We also really care about lightning from an atmospheric perspective, because lightning can only happen if you have really huge number of charged particles build up in the clouds.

And knowing whether Venus has those charged particles in the clouds is something that atmospheric scientists really care about. And the wavelength that lightning occurs at can also tell us a lot about the molecules that make up the atmosphere, because that wavelength depends on the particles in Venus's atmosphere. So we can also get a lot of information about what Venus is like from that. What do you need to create lightning, David? Do we know if, like, is wind important? Yeah, so to build up some of those collections of charged particles on Earth, the mechanisms that we know about, for example, are, you know, regions where there's a lot of dust. This also happens on Mars.

You can get lightning strikes associated with dust storms. You can also get them in regions of high wind where the clouds sort of move rapidly over the surface or past each other, where they can differentially charge. Now, it's really unknown whether those conditions exist on Venus, and lightning would be an indicator that they do. So if it's there, it tells us things about the planet that we don't already know, and that's why people care about it. Or if it's not there, that also gives us information about the planet because it tells us that these surveys. circumstances that we expect or are familiar with on Earth may not be there on Venus. Harriet, this might be a stupid question, but is there a way to directly observe lightning on Venus? Like, could you look for flashes?

Not a stupid question at all. People have been looking for those flashes for quite a while. The Japanese Tsuky mission has actually got a camera on it that's specifically designed to look for lightning. So this Tsuky spacecraft is orbiting around Venus trying to take photos of lightning flashes that could be happening. And actually, in the first three years of their operation, they didn't see any lightning flashes, which is another indicator that lightning either isn't happening or isn't very common. Well, what is causing the Whistler webs if it's not lightning, Harriet?

We think that it could be an explosive process happening in the magnetic environment around Venus, where magnetic field lines in the space plasma surrounding the planet break apart and then snap back together. When this happens, a process called reconnection, it fires off beams of electrons. And we know from observations on Earth that these electron beams can generate whistlewaves. So we think that a similar process could have happened over at Venus and could be responsible for all or some of these whistlewaves that have been seen over the decades. Electron beams, would you see those or feel those on Venus if you were on that planet? If you were standing on the surface, you probably wouldn't be able to find out.

feel these electron beams because you'll be shielded by the very thick atmosphere. But if you're floating out in space, then you probably could get pinged by them. David, this is data from the Parker Solar Probe. What is the Solar Probe doing looking at Venus? Right. So the Parker Solar Probe mission is designed to get as close to the sun as physically possible to try to sort of scoop up pieces of the outer solar atmosphere. so we can understand how the sun generates what's known as the solar wind or the stream of particles that's continually coming off the sun,

and all stars really. Solar probe has during the course of its mission or prime mission, 24 different orbits about the sun, and those orbits get progressively closer to the sun. And the way that's achieved or the orbital dynamics that allow that to happen involve these close encounters with Venus, such that we can shed angular momentum and allow the spacecraft to get ever closer to the sun. Is there another flyby planned for Venus?

Are there more Venus questions that the solar probe might help us answer? So there is one more flyby planned of Venus in 2024, and that flyby will take us very close to the planet, something like or approximately 250 miles off the surface. What will you be looking for? Well, we'll be looking for lightning, Harriet and I, for. sure. Other folks, of course, will be looking for different processes related to some atmosphere chemistry, some related to, you know, dust rings near the planet, some related to the electric

and magnetic field environment near the planet. So for you, the jury's still out about the lightning. Well, I think, you know, there's this 40-year-old mystery, right? One camp has been saying, hey, we see Whistlers every time we go to Venus and we know on Earth that Whistlers are associated with lightning. And then another camp says, well, we haven't seen any flashed. that we can conclusively call lightning. So where's the resolution? Because neither of those observations is incorrect. It must be our interpretation.

And so one of the things that Solar Probe allowed us to do was sort of provide a new interpretation that allows both observations to be true, but points to, you know, either a very low level of lightning on Venus or perhaps no lightning on Venus. Which is the outcome you would prefer? The whole debate keeps going or it's wrapped up? up neatly with a bow. It would be very nice to have it wrapped up neatly, but I also think it's just a fascinating topic. So if the debate keeps going, now I'm allowed to keep on studying it.

There are very few things in science that ever get wrapped up neatly with a bow. That's true. David, can looking at Venus tell us anything about planets elsewhere in the universe? Well, in our own solar system, you know, we have Venus and we have Earth and we have Mars as kind of our three data points for rocky worlds. to a star. Earth, of course, we have a large and strong magnetic field that holds back the solar wind, and we also have an atmosphere that we can live in, that humans can survive in, and we know life can propagate it.

At Venus, we have a similar-sized planet, but we have no internal magnetic field. So the solar wind can buff it right up against the planet's ionosphere or the outer layers. And then at Mars, there is no planetary magnetic field, but we know there used to be in the past. And so Mars at one point had an atmosphere that could support liquid water and is now gone. So as we look out toward exoplanets and make observations of other stellar systems, and of course we're looking for things like life, or at least the ability for a planet's atmosphere to support life, and we look toward, you know, what properties of a planet are required to hold on to an atmosphere is one of those properties, a magnetic field?

And so that's an exciting question we can answer by comparing Venus and Earth. So as we explore processes like the atmospheric chemistry of Venus and the way the magnetic field can accelerate particles or generate waves like we're doing with this study, those are important pieces of information that help us along the way answer the bigger question eventually of is a planetary magnetic field necessary

to protect a planet's atmosphere against its stars' stellar wind. That's fascinating, because I think in the exoplanet conversation, I feel like we often talk about composition of gases. Like, that's the headline that I'm always looking for, but it's interesting to think that there are other ingredients that we should be thinking about for what makes life possible. So composition of gases is the thing we can most directly observe at this point.

But those composition of gases, of course, is very likely, to be impacted by the star's stellar wind and by the existence or non-existence of a planetary magnetic field. So I like watching a good thunderstorm. It may not be happening on Venus. Where else in the solar system can I go? If we walk through the planets from the sun outward, Mercury, of course, can't have lightning related to the atmosphere because there's no atmosphere on Mercury. If we go to Venus, that's, of course, what we're trying to address here in this study,

and the answer is a solid maybe leaning toward no or very rarely. At Mars, there's documented evidence of lightning, especially associated with dust storms, even though the atmosphere is very thin. On Jupiter, there's copious evidence of lightning, both related to whistler waves and directly observing flashes. The same is true at Saturn. At Uranus, there are electromagnetic waves consistent with lightning strikes, but I do not believe that any optical flashes have been observed.

And then out at Neptune, there's a similar situation where some whistler-like waves have been observed, but no optical flashes yet. So I would say the jury is still out at Uranus and Neptune. This is making me think that Earth is kind of cool. Like, I don't know, there's something unique happening here. The next time I see lightning, I might, like I should appreciate it. Earth is a special place in a lot of ways. We've run out of time.

I'd like to thank my guests. Dr. Harriet George and Dr. David Malaspina, both at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Golder. Thank you both for talking with me today. Thank you so much for having us here. Thank you. That's it for today. Lots of folks helped make the show this week, including Jason Rosenberg. George Harper.

Kathleen Davis. Shoshana Bucksbaum. And many more. On Monday, the medical detective work involved in puzzling out rare diseases and conditions like brain amoebas. I'm Charles Bergwist. Thanks for listening. Have a great weekend and we'll see you Monday on Science Friday.