Science Friday - New Horizons Discovery, Science Fair Finalists, Screams. May 17, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: May 17, 2019

The most happening New Year’s Party of 2019 wasn’t at Times Square or Paris—it was in the small town of Laurel, Maryland, halfway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. There, scientists shared the stage with kids decked out in NASA gear, party hats, and astronaut helmets. They were there to count down not to the new year, but to the New Horizons spacecraft flying by a very distant, very ancient, snowman-shaped object: MU69. Now, the first haul of data about that mysterious object has returned. They reveal that MU69 is one of the reddest objects we’ve explored in the solar system, built from two skipping-stone-shaped bodies, each the size of small cities. Those details are featured in a cover story in the journal Science. Lead author Alan Stern joins Ira here to talk about it. This week, more than 1,800 student scientists from 80 countries converged in Phoenix to present their projects for Intel’s International Science and Engineering Fair, a competition founded by the Society for Science and the Public. Ira chats with two of the finalists. Colorado high school junior Krithik Ramesh came up with an idea for a real-time virtual tool for surgeons doing spinal surgeries, and Arizona high school freshman Ella Wang, along with her partner Breanna Tang, cooked up an innovative use for waste from soybean food products—enriching depleted farm soils. When you hear a scream, you automatically perk up. It catches your attention. But scientists are still working to define what exactly makes a scream. People scream when they are scared or happy. It’s not just a humans, either—all types of animals scream, from frogs to macaques. Psychologist Harold Gouzoules and his team measured the acoustic properties of a human scream by actually playing screams for people: Screams of fright, screams of excitement, and even a whistle. He joins Ira to talks about the evolutionary basis of screaming and what it can tell us about how human nonverbal communication. 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 Iraflato. Later in the hour, what makes a scream a scream, the scientists trying to define this universal noise. The first, the most happening New Year's party of 2019 was not at Times Square or Paris or any of the world's big cities. No, it was in the small town of Laurel, Maryland, halfway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. at a science lab. There at Johns Hopkins University, scientists shared the stage with kids decked out in NASA gear, wading flags, wearing party hats, and astronaut helmets. The festivities were not to count down to the new year, but to the New Horizon spacecraft, flying by a distant, very ancient snowman-shaped object, MU69.

Now the first hall of data about that mysterious object has come back, and we've got a little better idea of what it looks like and what it's made of. It's the cover story in the journal Science this week. Kelsey Singer was one of the authors. She's Deputy Project Scientist for NASA's New Horizons mission at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Singer. Great. Happy to be here.

Nice to have you. I'll tell our listeners if they have a question about the Kuiper Belt or where New Horizons is headed next, Give us a call. Our number, 844-724-8255, 844-825, or tweet us at a sigh fry. So that was an exciting event, was it not? It was very exciting. It was by far the most memorable New Year's I've had. I'll bet.

When we last checked in on New Horizons, just days before the flyby of MU69, everything went off without a hitch. Yeah. Yeah, I'm very happy to report that everything went really well. Even some of the really difficult observations that we weren't sure if we would be able to do, like our highest resolution pictures of the object, those all went perfectly thanks to the really hard work of our engineers and scientists on the team. And those photos that were sent back showed one of the weirdest objects we've ever seen. Yeah. Describe it for us.

Yeah, it's not every New Year's or even every day or every year. you get to see an object like this. This is the first time any of us have been able to see an object in the distant outer solar system. And M69 is a remnant of formation processes in the early solar system. It formed more than 4 billion years ago and has basically been sitting out in the outer solar system ever since. So we really wanted to visit it so we could learn about what happened in the earliest stages of planet formation. And we have photos of it on our website at Science Friday.com. slash new horizons, it looks like a snowman.

Yeah. Right? Two round? It's got a head and a body. The head is smaller in the body, so it does look a lot like a snowman. Except that instead of being made out of round parts, it's made out of kind of flattened parts, especially the body. It's a little more like a stone you might skip on the water or a really fluffy pancake.

So did they meet and slam together and stay locked together? crushed? Is that how this body formed from two different bodies? Well, we think they formed close to each other in the distant part of the solar system where they are now. And they were spiraling around each other in what we call a binary. So they were mutually orbiting each other. And instead of violent collision, we think it was more like a gentle merger. And so they spiraled into each other and became connected and then stayed connected for the rest of solar system history. And the reason we think it wasn't a big violent collision is because they would have hit each other in a way that would have made them into fragments of themselves.

And instead, we see them preserved as their original primordial bodies just stuck together. So if there were people on them, you'd say they sort of docked with one another. Yeah, it could be. It is. We wanted to be very gentle in order to not destroy either one of the bodies. And that's very similar to how, say, you know, you might have something. docking with the space station. Right. And it has a reddish color, does it not?

It does. We knew before we got there that it was one of the reddest objects in the solar system. And we've been able to learn about why now, thanks to data returned from New Horizons. And New Horizons was able to tell us about the composition of the surface. And we now know it's a combination of water ice, which we expected. There's also a type of alcohol. It's not one you would want to drink. It's called methanol, which was a little surprising to find on the surface. And then also other complex organic molecules is what we call them,

but they're made out of carbon and hydrogen and some nitrogen, and they get really processed sitting on the surface of MU69 over the last 4 billion years. And all that radiation turns them into kind of an organic, gunky residue. And we believe that's what makes this red color. And, you know, we keep hearing about how did life form on Earth possibly be coming from hydrocarbons or carbon objects in the solar system coming into Earth? Could this object explain any questions about how the planets in our system formed or other mysteries? Yeah, that's right. So the organic molecules we see on ME69 today are not living, but they are the precursors, we think, to what created lots of different things in the solar system.

including life on Earth. And there are some theories that comets, which are objects like MU69, that got shot into the inner solar system, may have delivered some of this material to Earth. And so, again, going out there and learning about these objects in their birth environment and learning about how they formed initially

helps us learn about all different parts of the solar system. I know that since writing this paper, you've actually gotten much more data back. Can you give us a little sneak peek? What else is in the works? Yeah, so the results that came out this week in science, they're based on about the first 10% or so of the data that we got back. And we've, as you mentioned, continued to get data back. And we will get even more data back for the rest of this year and even continuing into 2020.

But we are really trying to refine the shape of the object. And having additional images and data helps with that. because that exact shape helps us learn about how it formed. And then even being able to look in high resolution at the surface and look at the surface features, we see variations in how the surface look. Some areas are really bright. Some areas are a lot darker. We see some kind of almost arque-wit features,

which you can see in some of the images on the Internet these days. and even kind of lumps almost that the main body is made out of. And so these big lumps, maybe these were initial pieces that came together to make MU69 in the first place. What is the size of the object? Yeah, it's about 20 miles across. So we usually deal with really big numbers in astronomy, but this one's a little more easy to understand. It's about half the size of Los Angeles.

So it's a lot smaller than Pluto was. Pluto is more like the size of the United States. So this is a smaller object, and that's why we wanted to visit it because it's a piece of what became the bigger planets. So where does New Horizons head from here? We are continuing out into the outer solar system. So we're basically moving away from the inner solar system, and we're going to keep looking ahead of us.

We're actually going to use the cameras on the spacecraft to search in front of us, and we're going to try and find another object to do a close fly-by-of. It's not for sure that there will be one there. There's a lot of space in space, but we hope we'll find one. We'll be proposing an extended mission for the spacecraft to look for that other object and try and go by another one of MU69's siblings out in the outer solar system. And we have a tweet from Eric who says, where will New Horizons be when it runs out of fuel?

Yeah, we will be able to, communicate with the spacecraft, we'll have enough power for that until about the mid-2030s, and it'll be almost twice as far out as it is now. So right now we're at about 4 billion miles out, we're 43-44 times farther from the sun than the Earth is. So it's pretty far out already, and it'll be about twice as far as that by the time we are no longer able to communicate with. But even after we can't communicate with it, it'll just keep on going out. Sounds like another Voyager type of... It is.

It is very similar to that. Is it going faster than Voyager is? Will eventually catch up and surpass both of them? Yes, this is an interesting technical detail. Even though New Horizons was the fastest spacecraft launch off of Earth, and we got another gravity assist and a boost at Jupiter, we are still not going quite as fast as the Voyagers because they got multiple gravity assists at other big planets.

So unfortunately, we will never catch up with them. They're going slightly faster than we are. That's not a race, is it? No, no. It'll be complementary to Voyager because we have similar instruments that can probe the space environment, and so we've planned a lot of complementary observations to Voyager. Is this all just bonus time once you got past Pluto?

Good question. So our original mission goals were to visit both Pluto and the Kuiper Belt as a whole. And so we always planned to try to go by other objects. And we were lucky to use the Hubble Space Telescope to find MU69. And now it'll be a little harder to find another object. So I think MU69 was still part of our original goals, but anything after this will be icing on the cake. And what about one of our favorite subjects on Science Friday is talking about the mistake,

and possible planet nine. Is it out there? I mean, could maybe you guys find it with, you know, more horizons? Yeah, good question. We are not going in the right direction where we think this very large, very, very, very distant object is. So we are not really in a position with new horizons to try to find this object. Just while I have an extra moment here, I know you're at a planetary science. conference. Any cool news there? You could quickly share with this? Yeah, I am at a very nice

interdisciplinary meeting, and they're bringing together people who study our solar system, like we are with New Horizons, and they're also bringing together people who use big telescopes on Earth or space-based telescopes to study other solar systems. So they're looking at exoplanets, they're looking at planetary systems that are just now in the process of forming, and so we're trying to put all of those results together. And in fact, some people are calling this kind of a golden era for learning about planetary formation. That is cool. And we'll check back with you, Dr. Singer, when you, some more news, okay? Thanks for taking time to be with us today. Kelsey Singer, Deputy... Thank you. It's been my pleasure. You're welcome, Kelsey Singer,

Deputy Project Scientist for NASA's New Horizons mission. We're going to take a break, and after that, hundreds of high school students are bringing big ideas to a world-class student science fair. We'll We'll have a couple of folks from Intel's International Science and Engineering Fair. Find out what's going on there. So stay with us. We'll be right back after the break. This is Science Friday. Hi, I'm Ira Flato.

Spring is here, and that means it's science fair season in Phoenix, Arizona, where Intel's International Science and Engineering Fair is wrapping up this week. 1,800 high school students from 80 countries. That's 80 countries. They come to show off their projects and vie for prizes. But we're not talking about slime or Diet Coke and Mentos Tricking or even that Pavlovian conditioning on your sister. Instead, we've got sensors that alert drivers if they left a child in a car, a GPS device that helps prevent school children from being kidnapped, hybrid wind turbines, solar collectors, and so much more.

And we've invited a few of the competition finalists to talk about their project. First up is Ella Wang, freshman at Basis Chandler High School in Chandler, Aller, Arizona. Welcome, Ella. Thank you so much for having me. You're welcome. You had a unique idea for enriching farm soils. Tell us about that. Yeah, so our project explored the potential of using soybean curd residue, which is like a mass-produced waste material to improve soil productivity.

So around 261 million tons of this residue is produced every year. it gets thrown into landfills and has a lot of environmental damage because it releases methane. So our project explored how we could use this residue and incorporate it into soil. And we found that when incorporated into soil, it could raise nitrogen and potassium levels from depleted to sufficient and substantially increased waterholding capacity. So what this means in the real world is basically that we can help improve the crop yields and drought resistance of the soil. by adding in a waste material and at the same time decrease the negative impacts of waste on the environment. Now, we here in the States, we don't understand that there's a lot of soybean curd residue out there in the world, isn't there? Mm-hmm.

I mean, a lot of people, where did this idea come from? Yeah, so my mom actually makes soy milk at home, and I noticed that she would throw away really large quantities of this residue. So we wanted to study whether it could be used in a more effective manner rather than just letting it go to waste in a bunch of landfills. So because there are a lot of landfills with soybean curbed waste in it, right? Several hundred million tons in landfills every year. Yeah, and because it's organic matter, it will release methane and a lot of bad odors when it goes into landfills. So tell me the kind of process you went through.

What kinds of tests did you perform to figure out how adding soy waste to soil changed its properties? So we tested the four major properties of soil, which were the nitrogen and potassium concentrations, water holding capacity and permeability. So for the nitrogen and potassium tests, we used a color qualifier. So we added the SCR to soil in different ratios, the soybean crude residue, which I'm going to abbreviate as SCR. It was added in different ratios. And we would perform a test on the water. We would add water into the soil.

And then we would perform a test on it where we would add a certain powder and it would react with the water to develop a certain color. And the darker the color, it would mean that there were more of a certain nutrients. And then we would compare the colors to see the relative concentrations. And then for the water holding capacity test,

we compare. how much water the soil could retain versus how much water we added into it, and then that would be expressed as a percentage. Were you surprised with the outcome that you found? Yeah, when we first did this, we expected that it would maybe slightly raise nutrients levels, but it actually, when we added the SCR to the soil, there were six times higher of each nutrient, and that was really surprising because considering adding, this waste material can make soil go from depleted to sufficient in nutrients, it was

pretty shocking. That's amazing. I want to add one more student, scientist, to the conversation. Crithick Ramesh, Jr. at Cherry Creek High School in Greenwood, Colorado. Welcome, Krithic. Hi, thanks for having me. Now, I understand you have some good news for us. Is that correct?

Yeah. I was lucky enough to win the top award at the International Fair called Gordon E. Moore, named after one of the founders of Intel. Well, congratulations. You just found this out, what, an hour or so ago? Yeah, it's very recent. A lot of things I've been going on. It's pretty surreal. So you're the overall fair winner? Yes, that's correct. All right, now you have to work for that.

You have to tell us about your project. It's kind of a virtual reality tool for spine surgery, right? Right. So essentially what I found was that existing systems of navigate called fluoroscopy, according to the University of Minnesota's Department of Orthopedic Surgery, found that pedical screw placement, which are the screws that you place in spines, the actual probe only had 76 percent anatomical accuracy. So that's obviously pretty low, and that leads for either reopening of spines or having to redo surgeries.

So to sort of eliminate both the physiological repercussions of having a lifetime X-ray, which is fluoroscopy. I decided that to develop an algorithm that could predict spine biomechanics using a preoperative MRI or CT scan and then optimize the surgical approach. And then once this was done, I would use something called an augmented reality headset built by Microsoft to interact with the actual patient in a theoretical environment and then optimize the surgery to help surgeons. So it's a better way to do surgery? Yeah, it's 98.6% accurate, anatomically accurate, with 1.33 millimeters in precision. Do you have an agent yet? No.

A lawyer? To patent this or to get it working? After today, you might have one, right? What was your inspiration? What got you interested in this? Yeah, it's actually sort of a funny story. A lot of people, when they do science fair projects, the background is pretty intellectual, but I was actually playing just dance and Shakira's hips don't lie.

And when I was trying to figure out how the motion tracking system worked, I was looking a little bit into it, and I found how they predict the motion. And I was wondering, what if we apply this to radiology images, then we could predict spine motions and then predict surgery. So it was dancing. Yeah. You know, it's amazing where people have some of their best ideas. Yeah, I got pretty lucky.

Yeah, you know, dancing or just driving something like that. So where do you go with your project now? What do you see as its future? Yeah, that's an excellent question. So while 1.33 millimeters is actually good enough for the spine, it's not accurate enough for the knees and hips. So the margin of error for functional parts because the knee moves back and forth, and so do the hips, the precision required is 0.4 millimeters.

So refining the algorithm more for more complicated surgeries that require greater precision and also working with soft tissue radiology, such as tumor resections and stuff like that. And Ella, where do you see with your project? Do you have any future goals for it? Yeah, I'm hoping that it can be utilized in the real world, that companies that manufacture soybeans can rethink. how they're disposing of their wastes. And one of the statistics that we found was that in Japan, $150 million is being spent on disposing of this waste. So I'm hoping that with this research,

instead of using all that money to dispose of it, we can use it to transfer the residue to areas of farmland that would be useful. That's great because on Science Friday, we like to talk about soil science quite a bit. It doesn't get as much attention as it needs, does it? Mm-hmm. Do you figure you might have a career in soil science? I'm definitely thinking it's a possibility.

I was actually, this was like one of my first interactions with soil, and I basically got interested in it because I take environmental science class, And we did some labs on soil, which is kind of what got me into it. You know, let me ask both of you, we know here from looking at science for almost 30 years on our program, that science isn't always a success story. It can take a lot of failures before research pays off with new insights. Krithic, do you have any words of encouragement for classmates or our listeners who may struggle with this? You must have had a failure or two on this project.

Yeah, quite a few. Getting access to the right stuff was very difficult. Getting a HoloLens and getting access to that. I just endlessly contacted people until one person responded. And I think people are very intimidated by complicated projects, and I think it goes to show how starting with a simple idea or anything can transpire from just very basic principles. And, like, hitting roadblocks,

can be incredibly discouraging, and we've all hit them at some point, and like you want to quit or you think it's too hard, but the amount of passion and the love that we have for these fields is what ultimately motivates us, and I think that when you keep that in mind and you work through those hardships, the outcome is pretty incredible. Ella, would you agree? Yeah, definitely that no scientist is going to change the world if, you're not. they don't make a mistake. So I hope that people, even if they do find some difficulties, that once a while maybe take a

break, come back to it, and, you know, you'll be reinvigorated. Are you going to do Science Fair again, Ella? Yeah, definitely planning on it. I still have, like, a lot of years in front of me. And what would be your next project? I'm actually not sure yet. I was considering the possibility of continuing. my current one, but I also want to explore different categories.

And Krithic, a new project for you? Yeah, I really liked working with radiology, and I was thinking about fetal surgery and artificially increasing the resolution of ultrasound images so that you can operate them as something called a speckled echocardiogram, which allows you to see the cardiac performance of patients. but if you're able to do it for fetuses, people with congenital disorders that have tumors that take up more blood supplied in their hearts, you can actually perform the surgery without significant amounts of radiation, so it's safer for the mom and the baby. Are you both aware of how much you have accomplished at such a young age?

Do you think about it at all? Do you want to go to race? I think that the entire experience has been kind of, of a little overwhelming, but at the same time, there's, you know, 1,800 of us. So once you're together with all those people, you don't feel like that it's as amazing as it probably really is. So it's sort of incredible to see, it's very humbling to see all the other research that everyone is doing, and especially with the amount of access to information that we have, whether that's like machine learning databases. or access to medical data,

it's pretty inspiring to see how much everyone was able to accomplish. And when I initially did science fair, I was a little intimidated the first time I came, and then I realized how friendly everyone is and how equally excited they are about their research as all of us are as I was. And it's very exciting. If you had to pick out, you walked around, you made friends,

you know, some of the other students. if you had to pick one out. Another project that you thought was great. Let me ask each one of you, Ella. Anything else that you see that really excited you? Yeah, I saw a project on predicting the effects of people who abused drugs. And I thought that that was one of the projects that would really have a real-world impact. and I think that overall, all the projects were really inspiring

because we all come from different areas of the world and we have different backgrounds yet. We're all connected by the common thread of science. So it was really motivational. Amira Flato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with a couple of scientists, Ella Wang, freshman at Basis Chandler High School and Chandler, Arizona, at Crithick Ramesh, Jr. at Cherry Creek High School in Greenwood, Colorado, and the winner of the

Intel Science and Engineering Fair announced just a few hours. Has it sunk in yet, Crithic? Definitely not. It's a surreal experience, and it's, I'm so humbled to have won it, and it's truly something I've been looking. Every year, I used to look at, like, the confetti fall, falling on people, and it was one of the goals that I had. It was like those were my idols, and it's incredible to see that I was lucky enough to get that opportunity. When I talk to young people, millennials, people your age, they're fearful about their future. They're fearful about the future of their planet from what they see going on. Do you share that concern, Ella?

Do you share that concern, Krithic? Ella? Yeah, definitely. I think that for me personally, concerns about global warming and environmental degradation are becoming more and more important, and it's even like infiltrating other aspects of the world like politics. And even though we're fearful of it, I think it's more important to stay optimistic that the younger generation has the ability and has the power to innovate. and we can overcome those issues. Krithic, you feel the same way, or are you a little more pessimistic?

So, no, I definitely agree. I think that having a certain level of concern was good for us because it served almost as a catalyst for all the innovation that we see at these fairs. All of these students here are trying to solve one of the most intractable problems that the world faces, and without this level of concern and initiative, we won't be able to solve them in the future.

Yeah, and it's good to see that, you know, I'm a believer, the more I listen to young people, that the young people are going to save us. And, you know, you have a great burden on your shoulders. It's your world, you know, I've lived it already. Do you feel that burden? Or you just filled an opportunity here. That's what I hear you saying. I feel like, for me, science was always something where I could explore my passion,

and once you start to do that, the impacts come later, and as I start to learn, you realize how the research that you do helps the world. And it doesn't feel like a burden more so as like, almost like, if you think of it more like a sword, and it's like something that empowers you to do things more so than something that's weighing you down. Okay. That's very helpful. Wait to end our conversation.

Congratulations to you, Crithick. Thank you. Crithic, Ramesh, Jr. at Cherry Creek High School in Greenwood, Colorado, Ella Wang, a freshman at Basis Chandler High School and Chandler, Arizona. Coming up next, I scream, you scream, and after the break, we're all going to scream. We're going to talk to a scream researcher. There is, yeah, it's a real job who's trying to figure out why we scream. Why do you scream?

844-724-8255, or you could scream at us at Sci-Fri, you know, sort of. We'll see you after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. We're going to end this hour by screaming. Screams.

And they grab your attention. They do. They're unmistakable. There are even iconic screams. Did you recognize some of those iconic screams, you know? Did you know, even animals scream? Let me read you something Charles Darwin wrote. hares and rabbits, for instance, never, I believe, use their vocal organs except in the extremity of suffering.

Cattle and horses suffer great pain in silence. But when this is excessive, and especially when associated with terror, they utter fearful sounds. That's what he said. Now, the scream is universal, but what is a scream? What sets it apart for being a shout or a cry or something? A group of scientists wanted to figure this out when it comes to humans. So they measured the acoustical properties of humans screams to help try to define it. That's what scientists do.

They try to put definitions on things and measure it. And that can help them understand the evolution of this type of communication and why we use it. And their work was presented at this week's Acoustical Society of America Meeting. My next guest is part of that group. And here to talk about that is Harold Guzzulis. He's a professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira.

Thanks for the invitation. Love the show, by the way. Well, thank you very much. Would it be fair to call you a screamologist? Is there such a thing? Well, you could say that. I'm an animal behaviorist interested in animal communication and non-linguistic human communication. And over the years, I've just gotten.

fascinated by screams. And that work started when my wife Sarah and I were post-doctoral fellows at the Rockefeller University working with a very prominent animal behaviorist by the name of Peter Marler. And we were looking at rhesus monkey screams. And I've continued to have an interest in screams, animal screams, and then a few years ago realized that the literature just didn't address human screams much at all. In fact, we know more. more about animal screams than we do human screams. And so that got us interested in exploring human screams and how people perceive them and the different kinds of screams that exist, which is a really interesting area.

Yeah, let's get into it. And then as a scientist, then you have to know, there has to be a definition of a property. What are the properties of a scream? We started by trying to figure out whether people agree on what constitutes a scream. So the first part of that study that was reported on at ASA involved presenting about 180 participants with a range of vocalizations, some of which we thought were probably considered screams, but the important thing was that we wanted to see whether there was agreement. And they showed a lot of agreement over what constitutes a scream.

And that is, despite the fact that there's a lot of acoustical variation, because with humans, as probably everybody knows, we scream in a variety of contexts when we're angry, in pain, fearful, excitement. There are startle screams, and yet animal screams are mostly restraints. to fights or occasionally in confronting a predator. And so human screams vary a lot more acoustically and in the context in which we use them. And so the first stage was to ask, do people agree on what constitutes a scream? And so unlike some of the previous research that has attempted to explore the issue of what are the parameters,

what are the acoustical parameters that define screams, we wanted to first say, all right, do people agree? And now let's look at the vocalizations that they deem screams and compare them to the vocalizations that were not screams. Now, I scream, you scream, you know. And I understand that there's a property of what makes a scream called roughness. Can you tell us about that? That is, that came out in a paper a couple of years ago.

by Luke Arnal and colleagues. And roughness, it's not an easy thing to define, but it has to do with rapid amplitude modulation in a vocalization. So with a lot of amplitude modulation, you get a harsh buzzing or gravelly sound. And so it was their contention that roughness is the prime feature of, that defines a scream.

We think it's a little bit more than that, and I believe that subsequent research by that group has also found that roughness is not restricted to screams, but some components of infant crying is also rough. So roughness is associated with aversiveness, and screams, for many, are indeed averse. Okay, so we want to test how well our listeners can identify a scream, and we want to play. a couple of clips. I haven't heard them. So I'm going to play along too, and you're going to tell us, we're going to guess if this is a fear or excitement or anger or a startle scream. You have been warned, listeners, there are screams coming up like this. Wow. I have to guess that's a fear scream. Would I be right? No. No, you would not. What is that? But that is actually exciting. It is a, I would guess, about a 10 or 11-year-old girl opening a present at Christmas.

And it's something she didn't anticipate. It's clearly extremely exciting. And that's the vocalization that she produced. All right. Now, if I'm opening a present and I go like, why is this not a scream and go, oh, my goodness, oh, my God, that's just what I wanted. I know. How is that, is that a scream, too? Well, not the way you presented it, of course.

But, you know, interesting in all of the examples of this kind of excitement scream. And in fact, you can search YouTube and find many examples of people opening presents and reacting in that way. But they all tend to be women. I have not seen a single instance in which a man opens a present and responds in that way. So that's... Well, you meant one. Let me go on to our next scream. Let's play this.

Let's hear it now. Gee, what kind of scream is now? That sounded fear. Absolutely right. It's the sort of the thing you hear in the movies, you know? Well, indeed, yes. And when you study this, do people have difficulty when you present these screens to them? Did they have to be difficulty telling you which is the correct scream?

Again, they identify. It's as if there's a high-level class of screams. And independent of the context or the emotional valence of the vocalization, they label them screams. And what we've explored in additional work that wasn't reported on at that meeting is whether or not people have the ability to do just what you are trying. to do, and that is identify the context of a scream. And it turns out, and again, this is unpublished work at this point, but certain kinds of screams are readily distinguishable

from others. So an anger scream, and I don't know whether you've got one of those queued up, but anger or rage is distinct, very distinct from fear. But, and this is interesting with respect to your original judgment, that excitement scream, excitement screams are not easily distinguished from fear screams. That's interesting. So acoustically, clearly they are more similar. Yeah. We have a third.

Excitment and fear. No, that's okay. We have a third example we want to play. And guess what type of scream this is? It sounds like somebody whistling for a taxi. Yeah. It didn't sound like a scream at home. I'm impressed because you're right. But interestingly, most participants scored that as a scream.

What, that was a whistle? Was that a whistle? That is a whistle. Absolutely right. I've been living in New York too long. That must be the case. No, that is a whistle and it does share certain properties in terms of the length of that whistle and the frequency modulation and the fundamental frequency all resemble to some extent screams. Now, of course, we chose that whistle because it seemed to us beforehand, oh, some people might confuse that for a scream, and indeed, that was the case. Let's go to the phones. A lot of people want to talk about screams.

Let's go to Alexis in Kansas City, Mo. Hi, Lex. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Well, I am a trainer for zipline guides and challenge. of course facilitators. Oh, my. Can I collaborate with you?

Absolutely. That would be so much fun. How many kinds of screams have you heard? Quite a few. Definitely on the fear side. But I actually find it more enjoyable for my own jobs. When I go down the zip line, that I scream, much like Peter Pan

in crowing and the enjoyment of flying and so I find it more enjoyable at my job when I scream. Is that like people on the roller coaster are you saying? Like the scream?

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And people pay good money to go to haunted houses and experience frightful situations in which they can scream. Yeah, exactly.

And I also recently went to a new kids on the block concert, and there was a lot of screaming there, and it was all enjoyment screaming. All right, that's a good point. Thanks for bringing that up. Is there a difference, Harold, between enjoyment screaming or, you know, getting that new present or screaming, like, you see somebody coming off a plane or going down the zipline? Indeed, those excitement screams are interesting, and the fact that people, have difficulty distinguishing them from fear screams, I find, again, very intriguing.

Don't fully understand that at this point, but people clearly enjoy screaming. Again, if you look on YouTube for scream contests, people enjoy competing, competitively screaming to see who can scream the longest and the loudest and so forth. There's something pleasurable about it. And, of course, any parent knows that children love to. scream. There is a hollering contest. I remember back in the day when I worked on all things considered. I was one of the judges. This tapes are coming in. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WN.Y.C. Studios. Talking about screaming, and that's with Harold Gazula's, Professor of Psychology,

Emory University. Let's go to the phones, because this is an interesting comment here from, was it Galene in the Lake Tahoe? Yes. Hey there. Go ahead. Well, I'm a retired Los Angeles police woman, and I have been in all kinds of scary situations. And when it's really, really scary, really scary, I'm embarrassed, but I have to say, I hoot. I hoot, just like a monkey, just like a monkey. And I don't do it any other time. I wouldn't even imagine. But then when it comes out, I can't stop until the situation is either safer.

or something that's changed, but I hoot. Are you trying to scream? Are you trying to scream? No. No. No. In fact, the last time I did it wasn't even on the job. I was hiking in Malibu in the mountains, and I was talking away and totally relaxed,

going on trail, and suddenly a snake snapped at me, almost hit my foot, my tennis shoe, And without thinking, I hooted backwards down the trail that I didn't even know I could do. I hopped and hopped. And the snake went through the air, and then I landed under the shade of a tree, and I got quiet. And I have no idea how I knew to do that because I had never done that in my life. Great story. Thanks for sharing that with us. Wow, Harold, everyone's, you know.

Everybody likes screams. And I noticed that on the web page, you had Munk's famous scream painting up there, which, of course, everybody recognizes. I believe it's second only to the Mona Lisa in terms of being recognized by people. Can you be too afraid to scream, you know? You see that in people in the movies or whatever, and she was describing, is she hooting? Is there a time when something just closes up or our minds don't scream? I believe that does happen. Do we know why that happens, or is that not part of your research?

No, no, we haven't been able to. You know, our research focuses mostly on how people respond to screams. So we play them through headphones, and then we have them work on a computer and answer questions about how they're perceiving screams and what they think they're associated with. But it's harder to study scream production. Right. Unlike in the days when we were studying. monkey vocalizations. You go out into the field, you work with a group of monkeys, and you put a microphone in front of them, and you can record screams. Of course, you know, you can't do that with

human screams very readily. No, you can't do that. And I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today, and I hope, you know, all your, how do you say, all your screams are a little ones, sir? Well, they're not, but still, I appreciate this opportunity. Thank you. You're welcome. It was a joy to have you on Harrell. Gazula is a professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta. And we won't scream. We'll just wrap the show up in a normal way. BJ Leiderman can compose our theme music.

Oh, one last note. One last note before we go for all you Texas fans. SciFry crew and I will be hitting the road this August. We are coming to San Antonio. We love that city. We want you to join us Saturday, August 10th, for Science Friday live from the great state of Texas. We're going to talk about science stories in the San Antonio area, have live music more. It really is a lot of fun. That's in San Antonio, it's August 10th, Saturday night,

not a Friday, Saturday night, August 10th, info and tickets at ScienceFrily.com slash San Antonio. I hope to see you there, August 10th, Saturday night in San Antonio, ScienceFrily.com slash San Antonio. If you missed any part of the program, you like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcast. And a reminder, it's people. People have been asking about this. We do have transcripts of all our past episodes on ScienceFriday.com. If you want to read it, you know, you want to sit back and not put on the earphones. We have transcripts, all of our past episodes, we have 30 years almost of past episodes,

ScienceFriiday.com, and you can find our past episode. They're in transcripts, people who might be some of your favorites from the past. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato in New York.