Science Friday - New COVID Vaccines, “Nope” Creature, NJ Toxic Site, Germicidal Coating. Sep 2, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: September 2, 2022

New, Extra Protective COVID Vaccines Are On The Way Earlier this week, the FDA approved brand new COVID-19 vaccines from both Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech that are designed to better protect people from the BA.4 and BA.5 omicron subvariants. At the same time, the U.S. is scaling back free testing and precautionary measures, putting more pressure on vaccines. Casey Crownhart, a climate and technology reporter at MIT Technology Review, joins Ira to talk about COVID updates and other science news of the week. They also discuss how the U.S. is bracing for a record-breaking heatwave, the devastating floods in Pakistan, how the city of Jackson, MI ended up without running water, why Greenland’s “zombie ice” is causing concern, a massive investment in solar power, and a clue as to how the Ancient Egyptians built the pyramids of Giza.   New Jersey’s Lenape Nation Fights Ford’s Toxic Legacy The Turtle Clan of the Ramapough Lenape Nation has lived in the wooded hills around Ringwood for centuries, enduring the impacts of European settlement and the building up of America. But the toxic waste that now surrounds the Passaic County community is from an invasion of an entirely different kind. And it wasn’t long before residents started getting sick. When the federal government created the National Priorities List, better known as Superfund, in 1980, abandoned iron mines in Ringwood were among the first sites to be listed; they made the list in 1983. Between 1965 and 1974, the Ford Motor Company dumped hundreds of thousands of gallons of paint sludge, solvents and other waste into the mines scattered throughout the Turtle Clan’s homeland. By then, the southern portion of the site had been sold off by Ford to the Ringwood Solid Waste Management Authority, which went on dumping more waste onto and into the already toxic land. Arsenic and lead, benzene and 1,4-dioxane leached into groundwater. Kids played among slabs of hardened paint sludge. Adults scavenged the dump sites for copper and other valuable metals. Read the rest at sciencefriday.com. Coming Soon: A Germ-Killing Countertop? From restaurant tables to office door knobs, not to mention anything inside a hospital, the world is full of surfaces that need sanitizing, lest someone catch a surface-borne viral or bacterial infection like the flu or MRSA. The typical solution involves sanitizing those surfaces with sprays and fluid cleaners. Or, sometimes, using materials that are hostile to microbes, such as silver or copper. But a team of engineers at the University of Michigan has another solution in mind: a spray-on coating that combines the stabilizing power of polyurethane with the well-documented germicidal qualities of essential oils such as cinnamon, tea tree, and lemon. As the team reports in the journal Matter this week, their coating seems to kill pathogens like SARS-CoV2, MRSA and E. coli within minutes—and lasts for months before it must be refreshed. Research co-author Anish Tuteja joins Ira to talk about the innovation, and how he thinks it might be useful.   The Surprising Animal Science Behind Jordan Peele’s ‘Nope’ One of the summer’s biggest blockbusters has been the alien horror film “Nope,” from director Jordan Peele. “Nope” has elements of many classic UFO films, with the Spielbergian charm of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and the horror and destruction from “The War of the Worlds.” For the spoiler-averse, this is your warning to turn back now. The big twist in “Nope” that differentiates it from other alien films is that it isn’t a UFO hanging out in the skies above our main characters. The saucer-shaped figure is the alien itself. Writer and director Jordan Peele attributes much of the inspiration for the alien as coming from sea creatures. He enlisted the help of scientific consultants including marine biologist Kelsi Rutledge to help bring the creature, known in the film as Jean Jacket, to life. She even gave it a scientific name: Occulonimbus edoequus, meaning “hidden dark cloud stallion eater.” Kelsi, who is a PhD candidate at UCLA in Los Angeles, California, talks to Ira about the ingredients that went into creating a new creature to scare audiences.   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.

This is Science Friday. I'm I Refledo. A bit later in the hour, how the alien in the sci-fi thriller Nope was inspired by real sea creatures. And despite our fears, why we wouldn't want a world without wasps. But first, there have been big developments on the COVID front with updates about Omicron infections testing and a brand new booster. Here with these and other science stories of the week is Casey Crownheart, climate and technology reporter at the M.I. IT Technology Review, Casey, is based in New York. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much, Ira. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. Let's talk about a surprising new study about Omicron infections, about whether people knew they were infected. There was the study that just came out where researchers followed a group of healthcare workers and patients at this hospital in California. and they found that of the people that they tested regularly, they were taking blood samples,

of about 200 people who had antibodies to the COVID virus in their blood, about half of those people weren't aware that they had any recent COVID infection. Wow. Why is this important to know? You know, with, especially with these new variants, we're seeing more people either not have any symptoms at all or have really mild symptoms that you might just think, oh, I have a headache or I have a little cold. but it really is a COVID infection.

And so I think that that's just becoming more common. Yeah. So people should be testing more then, is what you're saying. That's ideal. Yeah. So if you are feeling a little bit under the weather or had a recent exposure, it is still a good idea to be taking those rapid tests if you can get them. And there's bad news in that the government is stopping those free at home testing programs

as of today, right? Yeah. So last Friday, the White House announced that they would be stopping the government. the free testing program where they've been sending out tests. And the last day to place orders is today. Wow. This sounds counterproductive to saying you want to get tested more often. Yeah. So unfortunately, they said that, you know, they just haven't gotten enough funding from Congress to keep the program going. And, you know, there are other places for people to get tests, you know, private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid. But as far as that that stash that the government

has, they say that they're going to try and preserve what little they have for a fall and winter surge coming up. I see. And speaking of a fall and winter surge, there's a brand new COVID vaccine out, right? Yes. So we've got new boosters that were authorized by the FDA this week, one from Moderna and one from Pfizer, kind of the big players in vaccines that a lot of people have gotten. And these are a little bit different. They're called bivalent booster shots. And so that just means that there are two strains in the shots, both the original strain of COVID and the new omicron variants that a lot of people are catching. Wow. And I'm signing up today. I'm going to get one today. That's exciting. Well, let's hope that the vaccine helps contain the winter surge we're

expecting, but it's probably not enough, right? Yeah. So that's the tough thing. And we've known that for a little while that, you know, vaccines are really good at preventing the worst effects of COVID, you know, death and extreme illness, but they're just really not that great at slowing down transmission anymore. And some experts say that even these bivalent booster shots probably won't be enough to really stop people from catching and spreading mild cases of COVID. Let's move on to climate news where we're seeing incredible stories. Regions across the globe are facing climate emergencies, focusing on Pakistan, especially. Much of it is literally underwater.

Yeah. So it's been just really tough scenes to watch from Pakistan this week. You know, the country has had a really, really wet summer and monsoon season. They've seen about three times as much average rainfall this year from June to August as they would in a normal year. But it really came to a head this past weekend. There was really extreme flooding. And now about a third of the country is underwater. Wow.

And disasters like this are only getting worse. We're seeing so many more mentions of them, aren't we? Yeah. And so researchers are still a little bit hesitant to say, you know, this is just because of climate change. But, you know, we know that a lot of the things that led to this flooding are becoming worse because of climate change. You know, there was a lot of glacier melt in the country earlier this year. And we know that rising temperatures lead to more melting ice. And the monsoon season is also getting stronger.

And we know that a lot of, you know, rising temperatures and more extreme. rainfall is also because of climate change. So we are seeing more disasters like this and we are going to continue to. It is tragic. Are we saying that countries, though, are stepping in to help Pakistan? Yeah. So there is some aid that's starting to filter into the country. But, you know, it's the, the damages here are just absolutely devastating. You know, over a million homes have been destroyed. And the Pakistan government says that it's going to take about $10 billion to rebuild. It's just there's a huge need. The UN and Pakistan are still asking for more aid from countries, and it's just going to be a long rebuilding process. So the big emitters are not paying for

damages that climate change causes to the smaller ones. They're not just moving in very quickly. Yeah, you really hit the nail on the head there that, you know, a lot of people when disasters like this come up, they point to the fact that, you know, countries like the U.S. have done the majority of emissions for greenhouse gases. And countries like Pakistan just haven't. And so they're still calling for climate aid, climate reparations, but we'll just have to kind of wait and see what happens. Let's move on to another water story, but this is one that has a water shortage. And we covered this story last year, but it's still a problem. And I'm talking about what's going on in Jackson, Mississippi. Fill us in on the latest about what's happening there. Yeah. So like you mentioned, Jackson's water system has been just plagued with troubles for a long time. But it's become a new emergency. This past weekend, they actually also saw some torrential rain and flooding. And that really just brought

the issue to a head. And the whole city has pretty much not had water from the taps for the past week or so. This sort of just popped up into, you know, national significance because we saw all that flooding. But the water problems in Jackson have been, wow, they've been around for a long time. Yes. Yeah. So a lot of people are pointing to the fact that Jackson is a majority black city. And they've just been underfunded for a long time. And it's really a case where you can point to and see environmental racism in effect. And it's going to take a lot to really fix this. The city says they need about $1 billion just to fix the current problems.

And then they're going to need billions more for longer term fixes. Speaking of water, something a little more unusual. And I'm talking about something called zombie ice. What is it? How is it related to climate change? I see the TV series already coming up here. The zombie ice. Yeah, so this is an unfortunately scary story. There's this new research came out this week that shows that Greenland's melting ice sheet is going to eventually raise global sea levels by about 10.6 inches. Wow. 10.6 inches. Yeah. And that's globally. So that's about twice as much as people thought before. the study came out. And the reason, like you mentioned, is something that the researchers are calling zombie ice, which is ice that hasn't melted, but it's ice that they're expecting to melt.

One of the researchers called it to the Associated Press, one foot in the grave. You know, that's, I hate to say it, but to get attention to climate change, you got to call something zombie something, right? And then people will pay attention to it. Yes, it did definitely feel a little bit like that, that everybody would. was really seized on this idea. But, you know, it's unfortunately just one of those stories that shows how wild some of these challenges that we're facing with climate changes. You know, even if we're cutting emissions, a lot of these issues are kind of already baked in to how much temperatures have already risen. But there is some good news about climate change and or are combating it.

And that is about new investments in solar energy. Talk about that. We saw this week that this company called First Solar and they're the largest. solar manufacturer in the U.S. They announced that they are investing about a billion dollars in a new factory in the Southeast, as well as expanding their capacity in Ohio. And this is a big deal because, you know, the U.S. doesn't really make a lot of solar panels, but we're seeing that, you know, this and some other announcements coming out that more people are starting to build up that manufacturing capacity.

Does the new inflation reduction act play into this by encouraging these kinds of things? Yeah, so this announcement was probably in the works for a while, but the CEO in his statement about this investment did call out the Inflation Reduction Act by name. And so we will likely see a lot more investments and announcements like these because, you know, manufacturers are getting really good credits in the Inflation Reduction Act. They get paid for every solar panel that they're making. This is a really big climate bill that could help the U.S. solar manufacturing get a lot more competitive. From what I hear, though, the same thing is happening with bad. production. Yes, so many battery announcements the past few weeks. Toyota, Ford, a lot of vehicle manufacturers are announcing that they're getting huge, huge new battery factories up and running. So it's going to be a really exciting time to see how this plays out. Yeah, because the carmakers are going to get a huge credit for building cars in the States, building electric cars. So you've got to have batteries for them. Let's wrap things up with one more story that helps answer one of the great mysteries of all time, and that is how the pyramids of Giza were built. What's the current thinking?

What's the new thinking? I love this story. So for a long time, scientists kind of thought that there needed to be some sort of river or water in order to help build the pyramids, you know, to move those giant bricks around. But they weren't really sure how that would have been possible because the Nile today is miles away from where the pyramids are. But there were these documents or these papyrus fragments that mentioned rivers being used to transport the bricks. These researchers went looking for evidence of where the river used to be. And they drilled down into the soil and found evidence of plants going back thousands and thousands of years and were able to kind of figure out that there did used to be a branch of the Nile River that went right by the pyramids. Wow. So no one's in denial about denial.

I could sneak that in somehow. So what's left to solve in the mystery then of the pyramids? There's a surprising amount of things we don't know about the pyramids. So, you know, one story that is still kind of ongoing is there are giant voids in some of the pyramids. You know, these might be rooms. We just don't really know a lot about how the pyramids were constructed, what exactly was going on there, and even what's in there today. So there's still a lot to figure out. And one more thing, a reminder, right?

keep your fingers crossed tomorrow, NASA's going to try launching Artemis to the moon again. Are you excited, Casey? Yeah, I'm really excited to watch this launch. It's going to be tomorrow afternoon, hopefully. They should be able to take off and send Artemis one up to orbit the moon. I just hope those 100,000 people who missed it last time might get to see it again. Maybe there's a lot of hotel rooms that were filled up. Thank you for taking time to be with us today.

Thanks so much for having me. It was so fun. Casey Crownheart is a climate and technology reporter at the MIT Technology Review. Casey is based in New York. We have to take a break, and when we come back, the story of how one New Jersey town fought the Ford Motor Company to clean up toxic industrial waste left on indigenous land. Stay with us. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday.

I am I. Refledo. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNNNO. St. Louis Public Radio Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. Superfund sites are the most polluted locations in the country. Actually, they're abandoned industrial waste sites contaminated from hazardous materials. New Jersey has the most superfund sites in the U.S.

I'm talking a whopping 114. A podcast from NJ Spotlight News, a division of New Jersey PBS, investigates what's going on at those sites and how climate change is expected to impact the people who live nearby. Joining me now is my guest, Jordan Gosporei, creator and host of the Hazard NJ podcast, joining me from New York. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me, Ira. And yeah, joining from New York, not New Jersey, unfortunately. But I will be there tomorrow. So... Okay. Let's talk about what we're focusing on today. Back to New Jersey, Ringwood, New Jersey. which you understand gets a whole episode of the Hazard NJ podcast.

Tell me why. Tell me a bit about the history of Ringwood and the indigenous people who live there. It does get a whole episode. It's actually our longest episode so far. And that's because of the decades-long struggle between an indigenous group of people and Ford Motor Company. It's this sort of David and Goliath struggle and has been like one of the most fascinating episodes I've worked on so far with this show. So one of the reasons Ringwood is so fascinating to me is it's an abandoned mine, a former mining district. It was one of the first superfund sites to be put on the national priorities list.

It is also the only superfund site ever to be put back on the superfund list. Wow. So it was put on it, taken off, said it was clean, and then put back on the list because turns out it was not clean. Wow, that's some reputation to have. Exactly. Yes. And I mean, there's a long history, like I said, with Ford Motor Company, turning the mines, once the mines were abandoned, turning the mines into this toxic waste dump in the 60s and 70s. I mean, they polluted astronomically to this site. I mean, we're still feeling the effects today, the people there in the borough of Ringwood. These toxins impact

not only the land, but the groundwater in this community. And it continues to this day to threaten the health of the people that live nearby. And the people that live nearby, and the people that live nearby are mainly members of a sect of the Ramapo Muncie Lanopae Nation called the Turtle Clan. And then the Ford Motor Company came to town. Exactly. So when I mentioned Ford Motor Company, how they dumped a lot of toxins. We're specifically talking here about thousands of tons of what is called paint sludge and other waste too. It came from the company's assembly plant in a nearby town. So they dumped all this waste into the abandoned mines that are scattered throughout the Turtle Klan's homeland. Well, so it became a Superfund site when back in the 80s? It did. Yeah. So the Superfund program

was established in 1980 and this site was officially put on the list in 1983, but in 1984 is when they started doing the cleanup work. And like I said, that cleanup work, as I'll speak to later on in the episode, did not work out very well. You talked about how the paint sludge was left behind by Ford. give us an idea of how toxic paint sludge is. What is it? Yeah. So toxic paint sludge came specifically from the Ford Motor Company's plant. Like I said, that was nearby. And when they were spraying the cars with the paint, there was residual. So the droplets that would collect on the ground and in the drains beneath the cars on the assembly line. So they would scoop up that residual sludge from the paint and take it off and dump it in the abandoned mines. So it's a mixture of a lot of toxic chemicals, including lead and arsenic. And one of the most, I think, fascinating things that I learned about paint sludge was it looks just like a normal rock when it hardens that these toxins come together. And it looks just like a normal rock. However, if you break it open, it smells like fingernail polish because of the acetone inside the rock.

And sometimes people have told us that sometimes when you crack it open, it's still wet. Oh, my goodness. Wayne Mann, he's a Ramapo community. community leader who actually grew up in Upper Ringwood, and he also grew up playing with the paint sludge as a kid. He remembers playing with the paint sludge and not knowing exactly what it was. The one yard where they came, a kid was sitting, banging on something, playing with his trucks. What he was banging on was a giant piece of sludge, lead. Another yard. Kids were out swinging on a swing set. All around that yard and swing set was all protruding through the ground, chunks of lead. It's all forwards. Well, that was supposed to have been all cleaned up. So kids were playing

amongst all this stuff, not realizing that it wasn't just normal rocks. There are reports of people actually breaking open the rocks and using what was inside to paint their faces when they were playing games as kids. Wow. And then the EPAD lists the site in 1994, but it's really a shoddy cleanup, right? You said it went in and then went out, went in, went out. Exactly. I mean, it only took Ford 11 years to clean up the site. And when you look at the history of the Superfund program, that is an extremely fast cleanup. Most sites take decades upon decades. Some sites aren't even cleaned up to this day, obviously. So 11 years was nothing. They cleaned it up very quickly, said, we're done. And then the community members kept finding paint sludge. And people continue to get

sick. And they put enough pressure on the EPA for them to come back and realize, yeah, maybe Ford didn't clean it up very well, and we have to go back and spend more money and clean the side up. And cleanup still continues to this day. Amazing. So what have been the health effects in the community from all this paint sludge? Yeah. So many of the people, you know, that we spoke with, like I said, that, you know, saying the contamination from the paint sludge has made them sick. I mean, there's been cases of skin rashes. I mean, we're not just talking about a skin rash that comes and goes, but severe skin rashes that stay for years and have long-term effects and scarring. You have severe headaches, bleeding from the eyes, nose, and throat.

But really the kicker is various cancers. So I mentioned in the episode that so many people have cancer in this community that locals call a particular street, which is named Van Dunk Lane officially. They call it Cancer Row because nearly every household on Van Dunk Lane has been touched in some way, by cancer. No kidding. However, I will mention here, too, that so far there has been no direct link between the diseases I mentioned and the paint sludge. So there's been nothing scientifically proven that the paint sludge has caused any of these diseases. All right. So you have this cleanup site, and now we have climate change coming through, right? Yes. What could go wrong here? What could go

wrong. A lot of things could go wrong. The most minor effect of it are sinkholes, and there have been reports of sinkholes literally appearing in people's backyards. They go outside, doing some work, go back inside to get a tool, come back out, and there is a sinkhole because the land sits above abandoned mine shafts. And we don't know exactly how many abandoned mine shafts are in this area. We don't have maps that point us to these exact locations. So you got sinkholes, but that, like I said, is like the least of our concerns when we're talking about climate change. We have more prevalent and intense forest fires, which means that some of these dangerous toxins could be released in the air. We also have drought that's going to make these health problems worse.

You have rainstorms that are going to be more intense and more frequent. So when that heavy rainfall comes down, you have the water rushing through the old mines in the fault lines and cracks in the rock. if that happens, the water could flush contaminated groundwater into nearby streams and rivers. I mean, those bodies of water are already polluted. So you have a lot of climate impacts potentially happening in this area that's already been hit hard with disease. And there was a class action suit brought against the Ford Motor Company, right? There was. Yes, HBO even made a documentary about the class action lawsuit. Wayne Mann was the name of the plaintiff in the case, which is called Mann v. Ford, also the name of the HBO documentary.

And in this case, I'd say roughly 600 of the residents in Upper Ringwood sued Ford Motor Company and other defendants, including the borough of Ringwood. And what they were looking for were collecting damages for the impact of all of that paint sludge dumping. So property damage and personal injury. And they did, I would say. they had some success with this lawsuit. The Greenwood residents that sued, they got about $11 million in total. However, when you start breaking that $11 million down for the families involved, we're looking at maybe each family member receiving about $8,000 each. Wow. So it's not a lot of money. Yeah. Yeah. Is the Ramapo tribe still asking for something else? Are they happy? Or what would they like to

happen? Yeah. So some folks, would like to be completely removed, permanently removed from this land and move to another location to start new. Other folks just want this site to be cleaned up once and for all and be able to stay on the land that they know and where they were raised. So there's sort of a split an opinion for some folks that live on the land. So I imagine you'll be following this story as it continues. Yes, and I imagine it will continue for a number of years. 2024 is the expected date for the second cleanup to be complete. So we'll see.

Okay, we'll have you back to talk about it then, okay, Jordan? That would be great. Jordan Goss Purae, creator and host of the Hazard NJ podcast, joining me from New York City. And more episodes of the Hazard NJ podcast will come out this fall. I'm Ira Plato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Remember sanitizing your groceries at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. or worrying about picking up the flu from touching a door handle? Oh, yeah.

Well, what if your doorknobs or your counters in your cabinets could kill a virus the moment it landed on it? Even deadly Mersom microbes and other communicable diseases. Germ killing materials have been an engineering holy grail for decades. But now a team at the University of Michigan has created a coating that seems to work quickly and it lasts for months without refrails. refreshing, and it uses essential oils. Yes. Here to explain more is my guest, Anish Tutasia. Dr. Tutasia is professor of material science and engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much, Ira. It's a pleasure to join you. Tell me how you found this coding in the first place. It is certainly a surprising discovery on our end. we were looking at different additives for isophobic coatings that we work on in my group. And as part of that, we were looking at different essential oils as basically additives that can lower the ice adhesion or improve the ice shedding capabilities of different polymers. As we were working with these essential oils, we started to realize how effective they were in terms of their antimicrobial capabilities. And certainly over the last several decades, probably the last seven. 70 years, people have been publishing and reporting on all of the different wonderful antimicrobial properties that different essential oils have. The challenge with all of these has always been

the volatility or the evaporation of the essential oils. As all of us know who've interacted with essential oils, these things are very volatile and then evaporate from a surface in a few minutes. So even though they have excellent antimicrobial properties, they typically don't last very long on a surface. We tried to figure out if there was a way of being able to stabilize these essential oils within different polymeric coatings to delay their evaporation rate and essentially make them last for a longer time. The challenge, however, was making sure that you could encapsulate or incorporate them into different polymer films without losing the antimicrobial properties of the essential oils. So the essential oils work by essentially diffusing into different

cell membranes for different bacteria and viruses, and we didn't want to lose the capability of the oils to be able to do that. So that was sort of the major discovery on our end on how do we stabilize these essential oils to be effective and yet persist for a long time. And you found that you could incorporate them into something we see and use every day, polyurethane, that plastic coating you put on your floors or on your wooden tables. Yeah, that was also one of the things as we started to look at the chemical structure of the essential oils, and it turned out polyurethanes have the right functionality to be able to react partially with some of the essential oils, which allows us to stabilize the remainder of the essential oils.

And, of course, that provided a whole lot of durability to the coating. These coatings are some of the most durable antimicrobial coatings out there. Can survive severe abrasion and wiping and all sorts of different scratching without losing. their functionality. So you just dump the essential oils into polyurethane, mix it together, and spread it on something? Almost that simple, though we make sure that the essential oil actually reacts with the polyurethane, but overall the process is almost exactly as you described. We basically mix in three different components into a single solution, spray it or brush it with a paint brush onto any surface that we want to apply it to, and then just let it sit for a while, and it cures

at room temperature and then it's ready to go. Now, we already have ways to kill viruses and bacteria on surfaces. Why is it coding like this so necessary or useful? Yeah, it's really sort of the antimicrobial surfaces that exist currently fall into these two categories. So if we think about the instant antimicrobial, so anything like a lisaul spray or a wipe, those are essentially instant kill antimicrobial,

so they'll kill anything, any microbe and virus on the surface in about one to two minutes, depending on the microbe, it might be three minutes. But essentially, after you've wiped the surface, as we all know, that agent evaporates, and essentially the surface can be contaminated again. And so you would have to wipe the surface again to be able to decontaminate the surface. We also have metals, as you were talking about earlier, about doorknobs, copper and brass is very commonly used for doornob. because it's really effective in being able to kill microbes.

But typically the time it takes to kill the microbes is really long. So it might take anywhere between 4 to 24 hours before it would kill the microbe. So let's say someone sneezes on a surface or has a virus on them and they breathe or they contact, let's say, a touchscreen at an airport. The next person coming to that touchscreen at the airport is going to touch it probably in the next few minutes. it's not going to, there's not going to be a delay of four hours to 24 hours. And so there is that risk of contamination. So this is where these coatings are so novel in being able to sort of combine both of these properties. They'll kill anything in a matter of minutes and still persist on the surface for months. And that really is the novel finding in this work.

Does it work on every virus we can think of? Or are there still things we don't know, you don't know that you want to know about it? Yeah, great question. So we've only tested about, you know, eight to ten different bacteria and viruses at this point. We certainly are continuing to work with more. The one sort of positive in all of this regard is all of these oils have been have evolved over, you know, thousands and millions of years to be able to work against a broad spectrum of pathogens. And so we're essentially sort of taking advantage of what nature has already done. So it does give us some confidence that this is likely to work against a broad spectrum of pathogens. And we can also mix and match different components, which we have done already, where we can take cinnamon aldehyde and combine that with the alpha turpennyol, and it seems to work against even a broader spectrum of pathogens than one of these components alone. Well, Anish, I can't wait. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you, Ira.

Dr. Anish Tutasia, Professor of Material Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, of course in Ann Arbor. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, SciFry goes to the movies. Yes, we're talking about the science behind the summer blockbuster alien movie, Nope. Stay with us. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Plato. And now we're going to talk about one of the summer's biggest blockbusters, a film called Nope. The new film is by Jordan Peel. It's now out for rent on digital. And just a heads up, this conversation will contain a lot of sports. Spoilers for the film, you have been warned. What you see?

Something above the clouds. That's big. I'll be. Big. Nope has elements of a lot of UFO films. There's a bit of close encounter Spielbergness, a bit of the War of the World's Horror and Destruction. The big twist, and here's the main spoiler alert,

it's not a UFO that's hanging out in the skies above our main characters. The saucer-shaped figure is itself the alien. And Jordan Peel, the writer and director, attributes much of the inspiration for the alien as coming from sea creatures. That will become evident in a moment when I introduce my guest. Joining me to discuss creating a brand new creature to scare audiences is marine biologist Kelsey Rutledge, scientific consultant for the film Nope and Ph.D. candidate at UCLA in Los Angeles. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. Thanks so much for having me. I'm honored to be here.

Well, it's so nice to have you, and I've got to say that in all the movies we've ever discussed on the show, I've never had to give way of the spoiler so early in our conversation. But let's get into it because it's a great film. As a scientific consultant for the creature, you had a very unique role in creating a brand new creature. Let's talk about what it looks like. Give us a brief description of it in the film. Definitely. So this creature has two main forms. So there's the saucer form and there's the unfurled form.

And the saucer form looks like an alien spaceship or the UAP, as Angel in the movie calls it. And it looks very mechanical from afar, but then later on we see that there's actually, you know, many subtle details that make it more animal-like. And then for the unfurled form, the creature unfurls to reveal this beautiful kind of sail-like structure. So it kind of has this main sail that looks like its head and these very dynamic pulley-like systems that control that sail. And then in the middle of that structure is its very ominous-looking square eye. You as a marine biologist, did Jordan Peel seek your advice on how to construct that creature? Yeah, definitely. So Jordan had a clear vision for certain elements and things he wanted for how the creature looked,

but he wanted to really draw from nature and different animals for inspiration. So I helped provide inspiration for different animals that he could use when creating the creature. Let's talk about the alien having these two forms, as you said, it's saucer shaped, which is for most of the movie, and then it's more unfurled shape it turns into at the end of the movie. You know, when I was looking at that, I was thinking of marine creatures, more like a jellyfish or something like that. Is that what you had in your head? Yes, definitely. So jellyfish and other cephalopods like squid and octopus were really big inspirations for the creature and how it moves. and it flies. Jordan, for the unfurled shape, he really wanted to create something that was really

hard for the characters to look away from. So he described it as peacocking. So trying to get the character's attention, because if you looked at it for too long, you know, it would eat you. But there was many deep sea creatures that inspired that shape. And the creature hides in the cloud, right? Yes, yes. So the creature has this really amazing kind of camouflage ability that's actually based on cephalopods as well. So like cuttlefish, they have these color-changing pigment cells called chromatophores. It can blend into any background. So the creature actually blends in to look like a cloud. And it also kind of goes to a specific region in the skies, like it's homing base, like a cave like area. You know, when I saw that cloud after we see it in the movie and we find out

that the creature hides in the cloud, I'm saying maybe the creature becomes the cloud. You know, like the cephalopods have the ability to change shapes, like the octopus, can sit there and become a rock and then something else? Yes, definitely. Yeah, so they have this amazing camouflage ability that scientists don't really understand how it works completely. And for the saucer shape, what sea creature is that based on? Yeah, so the saucer shape was actually directly modeled after a sand dollar. So sand dollars kind of have these ridges. They're not, you know, perfectly spherical. And they have this kind of notch. on the front too that Jean Jacket also has in its saucer form. And then on the underside is its mouth similar to Gene Jacket.

We should say that Gene Jacket is the name that the characters give the alien. Why is it so different than the name you gave it? Yes. So Gene Jacket is the common name. So in humans, you know, our common name would be just humans or the Great White Shark or the bald eagle. But then the scientific name is a two-part name that scientists use so that we can use it all across the world with no confusion, and it has to follow specific rules, and it has to be Latinized.

So that would be like Homo sapien. And you gave a scientific name to this creature, did you not? Yes. So when you discover a new species to science, you have to give it a name. So the scientific name we gave for this creature is oculonimbus Ido equis, which is Latin, and it translates to hidden dark cloud, stallion eater.

Wow. So kind of ominous sounding, but it's a Latin name and has to follow the rules of biological nomenclature. So there's all these rules you have to follow when you're naming a new species. And we also gave it lots of other names as well. So you may have heard like the kingdoms of life. There's the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, and that below that level of hierarchy is phylum, class, order, family, genus, and then species.

So for humans, you know, we're in kingdom, animalia, and then we go down to Homo sapien. And so for each of those levels, you know, we have to follow specific rules for naming something new. It has to be Latinized. It has to have a certain ending. So I created different names for all those different categories as well. Any idea what this creature could be related to in that naming process? Oh, yeah. So there is lots of different creatures.

Of course, you know, my preference is a lot of marine animals. But one of the class, the class is a blade of Zoa, which comes from this Latin word, ablateus and zion meaning ablate-shaped animal. So ablate means like flattened at the ends, which describes the saucer form of gene jacket. And so there's another class that exists in the animal kingdom that's Skyphozoa. So that kind of parallels that. And there's a really horrifying scene about halfway through the film where the alien sucks up a bunch of people who have gathered to see it. And when then we get a shot, I can't say I've seen in movies before.

or a shot inside the creature and how it digests its prey. It's really creepy and impactful. And is that also derived from sea creatures? Yes. So sea creatures and birds, actually. So the digestive system, the anatomy looks very similar to a giant larvation, which is this really weird, deep sea creature with this labyrinth like internal anatomy. But that digestive system is very similar to birds. So we'll actually describe this later on in some of the bonus material. we'll talk about, but birds actually swallow their prey whole. So it travels down the esophagus, which expands and contracts, and then it continues on past the stomach and into this organ called the gizzard.

And the gizzard essentially functions as the teeth of the bird. And so this is where the mechanical crushing takes place. And birds will also swallow grit and rocks to help kind of break up this material in its gizzard. And Gene Jacket also swallows all these non-biological items that will have, eventually help it digest. That explains that. Thank you for explaining all that stuff it spits out at the end. Yeah, like wheelchairs and nickels.

Having to do with digestion. And there's another connection to the birds with this creature. And as it's eating them, there's a sound that they're making, right? Yeah. So there's this scary kind of noise that the creature makes as well, which is actually just slowed down bird calls. So kind of it's roar. there's a scene toward the end with the creature is out there,

and it's displaying this big either rectangle or square thing. What is that? Yeah, so that's actually the eye of the creature. So Jordan really wanted a square eye. That was something that he thought would be really unique. And so octopuses actually have square-shaped pupils, so that was part of the inspiration for this square-shaped eyeball. Because I couldn't understand whether it was looking at me

or sizing me up to eat me? I think both. If you watch Nope, you know that it is part horror film and Gene Jacket is quite scary, but you don't find the creatures this alien was based on to be scary in the oceans, do you? Not particularly. I think I don't find many animals super scary

because like this creature in the movie, you know, most animals aren't killing machines. So if we take the time to understand the natural rules, you know, that an animal abides by, then respect those rules, then we're unlikely to get hurt by these animals. And do you think that's one of the themes of the film is understanding and giving respect to these other kinds of animals? There were horses there. There was the creature giving them the respect that they'd like and deserve?

Yes, definitely. That was definitely at least a theme that I saw essentially respecting these animals. and learning kind of the rules they abide by. Yeah. I think we're definitely a theme. You know, if the creatures, this alien is based on usually live in the sea, could you not think of the sky in the film, which is right as essential character, the sky itself,

as sort of an ocean above instead of below us, you know, where there's this ocean of an animal living in? Yeah, definitely. So an animal that lives exclusively in the sky, you know, is very unique and unexplored, similar to the ocean. Could there be creatures like this one living in uncharted parts of our oceans? I mean, right? We have explored so little of our sea life.

Could there be giant, mysterious creatures like this still living down there? Possibly. I mean, there's lots to still explore. I think larger animals are kind of less of a possibility because a scientist, a scientist we would kind of see some sort of signal likely. But, you know, there's new species being discovered every day. And you discovered a species of your own, a named one. Tell us about that. Yes. So I discovered a new species of guitar fish, which is a type of ray, like a stingray, but it doesn't have a stinger. It's this unique

looking fish that kind of looks like the intermediate form between a shark and a ray. It's an endangered group of animals, and I discovered it in 2019. And I got to name it as well. That's cool. And speaking of naming and discovering, I understand that there's going to be like a faux research. paper about this species published. Can you tell us about that? Yes, so I'm super excited about this. This is probably my largest contribution, but I'm writing an entire scientific manuscript to debut this new creature. So when you describe a new creature to science and new species, you have to prove it to the scientific community. So that consists of writing up a whole manuscript and getting it published and going through the peer review process. So we're writing a whole

mock scientific manuscript where we replicate the entire scientific process of describing this creature, you know, with the same accuracy and level of detail as I would do for a real animal. And where will you publish it? So we're going to fake publish it in one of the top journals in the U.S., which is called Nature. So we're going to kind of have the cover look like it's published in one of these top journals. And then it's going to be like a physical kind of coffee table book magazine that you can hold and read through.

Too bad it's not near April 1st and you could get it really placed. Yeah. A magazine ad. But people are taking this seriously enough to go along with this. And the idea of naming this as a species and publishing it? Yeah, I think this whole process is extremely unique and creative for the whole NOP team to want to replicate, you know, this entire scientific process. So I think it will give, you know, a different perspective to the readers to try and

understand they know what goes into describing a new species and, you know, really just describing every aspect will be a really cool read. I'm Irafledo. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, we're talking to Kelsey Rutledge, scientific consultant for the movie Nope based in Los Angeles. Did Jordan Peel ask you to do something with the species that you really did not or could not want to do in such a way that would be too far out? Or did he really say, give me how the creature would really act? There were certain things that they were really hoping for. For example, the square eyeball, which when he had spoken with other scientific consultants,

they're like, well, this isn't super plausible. And I was like, well, maybe not a square eyeball, but octopuses do have a square shape pupil. And so that's like very similar to what you're hoping for. And he's like, okay, perfect. You know, that's good enough for me. This is what I wanted. and we've got, you know, that justification. Does the creature give warnings like other creatures might,

if they're coming upon prey and get fearful or not know what it is and try to defend itself first? Yeah, I think you can see in the way it moves and kind of flies away. It kind of darts and moves in this kind of very animal-like motion. It also, when you get the close-up image of the eye and kind of this feather-like motion kind of entrancing you with the eyeball as well. It's kind of analyzing you. But Jordan really wanted the creature to kind of have a look at me aspect.

So the creature specifically wants to get, you know, the character's attention so that it can then eat them. You know, the sort of the movie sort of is left unresolved at the end. Do you think there's a sequel that could come? after this one. Well, I haven't asked him, so I definitely am not sure. I feel like I would love for there to be a sequel because I would love to be consulted again. But I'm not, I'm not sure. I feel like the kind of sequel will be the manuscript coming afterwards where we say, oh, we reached out, you know, the animal died, scientists, you know, went to analyze it. And

then we published this scientific manuscript and here's the next stage. Yeah. Let's talk about what you just said. You said, I was really excited to work on this and I wish I could work on another one. Tell me about that excitement. Yeah, I mean, I was just extremely honored to be involved. I think as, you know, I've been in science. I never expected that I'd be working with Hollywood on something, but it's just been an amazing experience and I really hope to do it again sometime. But I just really admire the whole team for creating a creature with science in mind. And they were very, they were very eager to cooperate with you and get the science right, as much as you can in a science fiction movie.

Definitely, yeah. So as a scientist, when you go to the movies sometimes and you watch a scene, you're like, oh gosh, you know, that wasn't realistic at all. But this was the exact opposite of what I felt about NOP. So they did a great job making it realistic and unique and new and scary, but, you know, there's still a little bit of magic in there. I want to thank you, Kelsey, for your work on the film and all the spoilers we got through. I can blame it on you instead of me now. So thank you for taking time to be with us today.

Thank you so much. Marine biologist Kelsey Rutledge, scientific consultant for the film, Nope, and PhD candidate at UCLA in L.A. And if you want to see pictures of some of the creatures that inspired Gene Jacket, head over to our website, ScienceFriiday.com slash nope. Here's Russia, a real. with some of the folks who helped make this show happen. Thanks, Aira. Our digital producers are D. Peter Schmidt and Emma Gomez. Ariel Zich is our director of audience.

Sandy Roberts is our education program manager. Annie Niro is our individual giving manager. And I'm Rasha Ariti, radio producer. Thanks for listening. Thank you, Rasha. BJ Lederman composed our theme music. And of course, if you missed any part of the program, or you would like to hear it again.

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