Science Friday - NSF Director, Soylent Green In 2022, Colorado Snowpack, Springtime On Neptune. April 15, 2022, Part 2

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

Did ‘Soylent Green’s’ Predictions About 2022 Hold Up? In the spring of 1973, the movie Soylent Green premiered. The film drops us into a New York City that’s overcrowded, polluted, and dealing with the effects of a climate catastrophe. Only the city’s elite can afford clean water and real foods, like strawberry jam. The rest of the population relies on a communal food supply called Soylent. There’s Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow… and a new product: Soylent Green. The year the film takes place? 2022. And spoiler alert: Soylent Green is people. While the 2022 the film depicts is—thankfully—much darker than our current situation, the message still holds up. When the film premiered, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the Clean Air Act were very much in the country’s consciousness. 50 years later, warmer temperatures, soil degradation, and social inequality are more relevant than ever. Joining Ira to talk about the importance of Soylent Green 50 years later is Sonia Epstein, associate curator of science and film at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. Also joining is soil scientist Jo Handelsman, director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery in Madison, Wisconsin.   The National Science Foundation Has A New Goal: Entrepreneurship The South By Southwest festival in Austin this year was the site of at least one unusual event: a press announcement by the head of the National Science Foundation, the primary federal agency tasked with funding and supporting fundamental research and investing in the education of young scientists in those fields. NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan announced he was creating a new directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) to focus on “use-inspired” research that can be brought to commercial markets, in partnership with businesses and entrepreneurs. The goal, Panchanathan said in a press release in March, was to “accelerate the development of new technologies and products that improve Americans’ way of life, grow the economy and create new jobs, and strengthen and sustain U.S. competitiveness for decades to come.” Panchanathan talks to Ira about what this new chapter means for the NSF, the future of basic research with no immediate commercial uses, and the challenges of persuading the public that failure, as much as success, is inherent to science.   The Colorado River Misses Its Snow High in the Rocky Mountains, under thin air and bluebird skies, the Colorado River basin is slowly filling its savings account. Craggy peaks become smooth walls of white and piles of snow climb conifer trunks, covering even the deepest, darkest corners of the woods with a glimmering blanket. The snow that accumulates in the mountains of Colorado and Wyoming will eventually become water in the Colorado River. Some of it will flow as far south as Mexico, running through kitchen faucets in cities and suburbs along the way, or watering crops that keep America fed through the winter. Year by year, those piles are getting slightly smaller and melting earlier — slowly exhibiting the sting of a warming climate. The way we measure the snow is changing too, as a shifting baseline for what counts as “average” paints a somewhat deceptive picture of how much snow is stored up in the mountains. Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.   Exploring Neptune’s Unusual Seasons Planetary scientists monitoring how the outer planets change over time have made a surprising observation of springtime on the planet Neptune. As the planet moves towards summer in its southern hemisphere, one might expect it to get warmer—but in data taken over 17 years, researchers observed that the average temperature actually seems to be declining. One theory involves the conversion of atmospheric methane, which traps heat, to ethane or other hydrocarbon compounds that release heat more readily, but more research is needed. The researchers also spotted the rapid formation of a hot-spot at the south pole of Neptune, with an increase of some 11 degrees C over just two Earth years. Models had predicted a temperature swing of perhaps 15 degrees over the entire seasonal cycle. These findings were reported this week in the Planetary Science Journal. Scientists don’t know very much about Neptune—it’s over 30 times Earth’s distance from the sun, and gets only one nine-hundredth of the sunlight. It takes around 165 Earth years to complete an orbit, meaning that the researchers’ 17 years of data account for only a small fraction of one season. Because of the planet’s tilt and its long orbit, the last time the planet’s north pole was visible from Earth was in the 1960s. And we’ve only visited once, via the Voyager spacecraft, over 30 years ago. Michael Roman, a planetary scientist at the University of Leicester in the UK, and one of the authors of the report, joins Ira to talk about the strange springtime on Neptune—and the planet’s many remaining mysteries.   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 Iroflato. Those of us of a certain age can remember the first showing of the movie Soilent Green. It premiered in 1973. The film drops us into a New York City that's overcrowded, polluted, and is dealing with the effects of a climate catastrophe. Only the city's elite can afford clean water and real food like strawberry jam. The rest of the population relies on a communal food supply called Sollent. There is soylent red, Soylent yellow, and Soylent Green. And spoiler alert, what is Soilin Green? You got to tell them, Soilent Green is people! Yes, people are eating people. And in what year is cannibalism the norm?

2022, of course. Joining me today to talk about the importance of the film and parallels to our current time are my guests. Sonia Epstein, curator of science and film at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City, and Joe Handelsman, soil scientist and director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery in Madison, Wisconsin. Welcome back both of you to Science Friday. Thank you.

Great to be here. Great movie. Great movie, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. It is. All right, Sonia, tell us, give us a bit more of a rundown of the plot of this film. Sure. So this is a Richard Fleischer film, which some people might know his other famous kind of

of science film Fantastic Voyage, which he made in 1966. But the plot, you know, it's based on a book called Make Room, make room, make room. And as you say, it's set in a very overpopulated New York City of 2022, and it follows a police detective who is at work trying to discover the roots of the Soylent Corporation that is, you know, basically one conglomerate that is in charge of all the food production in the city. And there's a sort of pertinent quote for this conversation about, you know, guards their farms like fortresses. This detective played by Charlton Heston is trying to unravel a murder that is somehow related to the Soylent Corporation. And film and art, right, Sonia, is there often a reaction to what's happening in the world. What was going on in the early 70s that

may have inspired Soylent Green? Yeah, so this film was released in 1973 actually on April 18th, so in just a few days from now. Silent Spring, the book that a lot of people credit was sort of the start of the environmental movement by Rachel Carson, was published about a decade earlier. But in 1970, specifically, there was the Clean Air Act that was passed by the EPA and also the first Earth Day. So by 1973, certainly the environment was a big part of people's consciousness, connection between the population and its effects on the environment. And also the book, The Population Bomb, had come out a few years earlier in 1968, I believe. And so, as I said,

the effects of a growing population on the environment and awareness of greenhouse gases, as you see in the film, that was all, you know, kind of in the public consciousness very much at the time. You know, Joe, in the film's 2022, there's almost no soil or agriculture land left. We're thankfully better off than in the film, but you're right about the loss of soil. We are in sort of a state in our current world heading that direction. Absolutely. The film is so clairvoyant. It was so predictive of things to come in terms of climate change and as well as loss of soil. We're losing soil about 10 to 100 times faster than we're producing soil. And so that puts us in a near crisis. and in some parts of the world, it already is a crisis in terms of being able to grow crops

and do all the things with soil that we normally do. And why is our soil eroding away? Well, we introduced the plow a few hundred years ago, and the plow does great damage to soil structure. So it breaks down clods and clumps and all that nice architecture that soil has naturally into single particles. And those are much more likely to blow away or wash away with wind in water than the clumps. That's probably the biggest influence. And then the way that we farm is

not increasing carbon in soil. It's not increasing the health of soil. It's just basically ripping the guts out of the soil and taking all the nutrients and leaving little behind. And that's just a function of the kinds of plants we grow for human consumption and the way that we grow them. They don't say in the movie that there's no soil up, but you can surmise that if you have to eat people, that it's you can't make food without soil, certainly not enough to feed everybody. Absolutely. Yep, they were absolutely right about that. Yeah, if I may, there's actually just to anybody who may be inspired by this conversation to watch the film or rewatch the film, if they've already seen it,

there's a really sort of interesting montage at the start of the film that kind of speaks to what you're talking about, Joe, about the evolution of farming practices. It starts out sort of uplifting and it's about, has the right brother, sort of about, you know, advances in human civilization, if you will, but then quickly sort of increases its pace and cuts to the advent of cars and industrial agriculture and things like that that kind of culminate in the opening sequence of an overpopulated world and no food. And the only soil, I believe they say, that is left in the city is in Gramercy Park.

And it's protected by this, like, you know, crazy fortress-looking tent. So just to add that. Great, great messaging. I mean, in this movie, they knew all the buttons to push on people at the time because we had all this anxiety. I remember about what we were putting in our bodies, weren't we, Sonia? Definitely. And interestingly, I mean, that also comes out of Silent Spring and what Rachel Carson

was pointing out about the use of pesticides. But this film, this film had a science advisor who was Dr. Frank Bowerman, who was prominently featured in the credits as the tech concern. and he was an environmental engineer from USC who was, you know, worried about population and pollution and you see people wearing masks. So definitely a lot of concern at the time that this film, I think, engaged with purposefully. Joe, is it possible to produce food without soil? Yes, we can produce many plants and crops like strawberries and tomatoes and lettuce, a lot of the vegetable crops and some fruits. In hydroponics or in some cases, aeroponics, you may have heard of

vertical farming, which is the idea of being able to stack up layers of agricultural activity in a hydroponic system, even in cities, so that you use very little of a footprint, but you grow plants going up instead of out. The problem is that we just don't know how, and I think it's unlikely that we'd ever figure out how to make the staple crops, of rice and corn and wheat, potatoes, some of the really high nutrient crops that we use in very large quantities in the world, either to consume ourselves or to feed to our animals, at the level in the quantities that we would need without soil. These plants are adapted to soil. They evolved in soil, and then we continued to breed them in soil. And so that's what they need. And soil is, it's more

than just water, which hydroponics, you know, gives you water and some nutrients, but soil is worth, it contains so much more than that. You know, Sonia, I think the movie has aged very well. You know, some movies seem to go out of their time, but I think the anxieties that were in that film in 1973 are still around us today. Definitely. I re-watched it recently. I think the only thing that looks a little kind of aged is the fact that I believe all of

This was shot in a studio. So you can see some of sort of the set dressings that to our, you know, CGI accustomed eyes look a little dated. But that's also the appeal of the film for anybody who appreciates kind of set design and hand-painted things. But yeah, definitely the issues having to do with wealth disparity and equal equity and access, issues around climate change, you know, that have only been exacerbated, you know, since this film was made 50 years ago, as I'm sure you've decided.

discussed on this show, but the recent IPCC report point out. So it is certainly one that is worth rewatching, particularly in this year. Yeah. One thing that did come true from the film is that there is a meal supplementary thing called Soylent that you can buy now. And supposedly it's not made from people. I mean, what do you think, Sonia? Would you give it a try? I don't know why they named it that. You know, it's. Seems like the death blow of the product before it's even on the market. Well, but would you give it a try, Sonia? Would I give it a try?

You know, I, as the film, you know, there's such beauty in cooking food and hearing the crunch and the texture. So I have never been one to look for meal supplements, luckily, because I enjoy cooking and shopping and all of those things. You know, it struck me, Joe, that the word soil yint has the word soil spelled differently in it. Do you think that was accidental or that was a hint about there's no soil left? I think that was a hint. I think that these people were so acutely aware of the environmental issues that we were facing and then would face even more acutely in 2022 that that had to have been deliberate. Otherwise, why would they have called it that?

Yeah, and one thing you stress as a soil scientist and you talk about in your book A World Without Soil is that there is a solution to this issue. Can you walk us through what can be done to reverse our loss of soil? Sure, it's actually one of the most soluble problems that we face today, which I find to be quite uplifting because we face so many environmental problems that we don't know how to solve. If we change our farming practices back to very straightforward forward practices of no-till farming, which means no plowing, where the seeds are drilled into the land instead of opening a plow with a furrow with a plow. If we use cover crops, which are crops that we plant at the end of the growing season, and they cover the soil and anchor the soil and

feed the soil over the winter until the next growing season. And then if we did intercropping, which is using multiple species to nurture the soil when we're using particularly, these plants like corn, which take so much out of the soil and don't put anything back in, we would probably stop erosion and begin building back our soil pretty quickly. So those are the three basic ones. And then, of course, adding more nutrients to the soil, adding compost, not throwing away all of our excess food that we do so readily in this world, but adding it back to the soil to be nutrition for the next round of crops would be very beneficial. And I want to thank both of you for going down memory lane with us today on Soilent Green.

Thanks, Ira. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Sonia Epstein, curator of science and film at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York and Joe Handelsman, soil scientist, director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery in Madison and author of A World Without Soil. And if you can't get enough of Soilent Green, the film will screen at the the Museum of the Moving Image this fall as part of the ongoing series, Science on Screen, Extinction,

and otherwise. We have to take a break, and when we come back, we talk to the director of the National Science Foundation about a new initiative that he says will improve U.S. competitiveness in science. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Analysts say the U.S. innovation system is slowing down. The Harvard Business Review put it this way in 2019. Productivity is lower than it was more than 100 years ago, despite increased investment in scientific research. If we want to see greater productivity growth, says the review, we need to explore alternative ways to translate science into invention. Perhaps the folks at the National Science Foundation came to that same conclusion, because the NSF, which is the funding source

for almost 30% of the total federal budget for basic research at U.S. colleges and universities, the NSF recently created a new directorate, sort of a new division, and they call the directorate TIP, technology, innovation, and partnerships, which has the same idea, helping research get turned into products. It's the first new directorate in 30 years, so it must be pretty important and for good reasons. Anyone who is watching, the U.S. share of the world's innovation, technology, and high-tech manufacturing on the decline might be interested to learn more. And we are. So we've invited the head of the NSF to tell us about TIP. Joining me now is NSF director, Sater Rahman-Punchanathan. He was appointed in 2020. Welcome to Science

Friday. Thank you so much, Ida. Good to be with you. I want to say you're in good company, because over the 30 years we've spoken with just about all of the NSF chiefs from Walter Massey to Rita Colwell to your predecessor, Franz Cordova. So thank you for taking time to join with us today. Thank you. And it's great to be in that company. Thank you. Let me begin by saying, you know, it's not every year or every decade that you create a new directorate. You said in a statement very simply that the objective of the TIP directorate is to translate research into practical application. I'm asking why you've decided you have to do this. So we feel that this is a moment in the nation for us to strengthen at speed and scale.

As you can see, when you look at the global competition, you find that the ideas and talent that across our nation is not fully tapped and fully realized. And that's the reason that we are launching this directorate to rapidly translate those fantastic exploratory ideas and curiosity-driven research into translatable outcomes were appropriate. And so that it might result in the kinds of outcomes that you speak about, how might it increase the productivity, how might it bring about unbelievable talent being able to get, you know, the jobs of the future? How might that inspire more entrepreneurial ventures, not just in a few locations across our nation, but in every part of our nation? Yeah, one of the stated goals of

tip is sustaining, enhancing, and enhancing U.S. competitiveness on a global stage. What has happened in the U.S. that has diminished its competitiveness? And how will you change that? So what I would say is, U.S. has always been competitive. What you're trying to say right now is that as the external countries and other parts of the globe are starting to also compete, now U.S. has got an opportunity to further expand, further speed up, further scale up, what we are doing and what we have been doing. And that's the moment that we are in. Two reasons. One, we have got the capacity to do this. We want the aspirations of every region of our nation to be fully realized also. And that's why this moment is very special. The capacity is there. The desire and the aspiration is there. So we're bringing it all together at this moment. which is very exciting. Well, do you think that Intel or NVIDIA or Apple needs help moving their research from R&D to the consumer market? Or are we talking about helping smaller research labs that already are receiving funding from NSF,

but can't take that next step? Both. So when you look at, you know, large companies like Intel and others, we have always had partnerships with Intel. I mean, just look at the recent announcement of Intel in the $20 billion investment that making in the state of Ohio. Now, NSF has got a $100 million partnership as part of that in terms of how do we look at research of future semiconductor and advanced semiconductor ideas, materials, devices, things of that nature, at the same time also preparing the talent in community colleges, in universities, and others so that we might then have this robust futures that Intel has been

delivering and will deliver into the future, and NSF becomes a nice partner. you will think of us as a catalyst, an enabler, and an enrichment activity. Now, President Biden's 2023 budget request has $880 million in it toward you and the new established directorate. Do you think you're going to have a tough sell in Congress? I'm so grateful to the administration and the president for putting together a strong budget for NSF, realizing the importance of the moment that we just spoke about. But I also have to tell you that we have got strong. bipartisan support in Congress. Whenever I speak to any of the members in Congress,

there is always a strong bipartisan support around these two themes that we have just been discussing, that this is a moment of global competition which is motivating us, inspiring us to do even better, more, faster. At the same time, there is also the recognition that talent and ideas that are democratized across the nation have tremendous possibilities and therefore it is incumbent upon us to provide those opportunities and that NSF can do both of these things at speed and scale, and therefore, there is a recognition of the importance of the role of NSF as a vehicle of delivering this progress that we are talking about. I have to turn the tables on you for a moment right here, because I know

that when I have written NSF proposals for funding over the years, and I've written many of them going back almost 50 years, I've always had to say, how do I measure success, right? You look at a proposal. It's going to be how do you measure success? How will you? you measure whether you have been successful in your project? So we have many metrics of success that we are putting together, and one of them is how much these companies that we are launching are securing venture capital so they can then grow and become successful ventures. So that would be one.

How many jobs are we creating because of these existing industries that are able to scale, as well as new companies that are forming, and what kind of jobs are being created? what kind of problems like climate change or the pandemic that we have at hand, how are these being solved because of the investments we're making in the regional innovation ecosystems that is being built all across the nation? Right. So there are many such mechanisms, how much new venture capital resources are these companies attracting.

So there are these measures and more that can really tell you, these are good thermometers of measurement in terms of seeing, whether we are actually making progress. So we'll be able to demonstrate the progress that we're making in a very tangible way. When we talk about research that companies can use, we're not talking about basic research, the very fundamental exploration of how things work,

which is the key to the entire mission of the NSF is being able to fund really basic research. Should scientists doing foundational research worry that they're competing for the same resources for scientists who might be creating devices that can be sold on the, marketplace. So that's a very good question. I just want to say that these are not either or these are and. That is what you're doing is as you demonstrate that you're able to deliver these

kinds of outcomes as more exploratory research becomes translated to outcomes, not that all of them will and not them all of us should either because there is high risk research that happens and some of them may not necessarily have translatable outcomes. That's perfectly fine. But where it is available, if we are able to translate them and show the value, then that only increases the investments further, which then further enriches the investments in the exploratory research. So I don't see this as this versus that. It is this and that and more. I'm already seeing this, Ira. Just, you know, the launch of the AI institutes two years ago, we have companies like Google, Amazon, Accenture, Intel, and others are all co-investing with us. So that's because

the fact that they see that this research is not only going to be about. the curiosity-driven research, and which is exceedingly important, and we need to unleash that at absolutely the highest scale possible, but that it is also resulting in these translatable outcomes that industry finds very valuable. So they want to partner and co-invest with us. Likewise, I expect that cities and states and other partners, foundations and others, will find reasons to want to co-invest with NSF so that we can build these at much higher scales than even what we are doing right now with the fantastic federal investment. that we are receiving every year.

Well, those are giant companies that you mentioned. The giant gigging giant companies, but does that mean if they're getting money, if they're co-investing with you, what about the smaller companies? The smaller companies that need to leg up and getting their products researched and on the market. Do you have enough money, as you say, for both things?

Yes. So if you look at the SBIR programs, a small business innovation research programs, right? This is precisely targeted at those small companies which are looking to seeing how they can have those critical investments for them to grow into successful ventures. For example, in 1982, Gary Hendricks was funded by NSFSPAR grant, and that was for a funding for a company called Simon Tech, which is now a global leader in cybersecurity. Likewise, Qualcomm was launched after co-founder Andrew Witterby invented the Witterby algorithm.

After receiving the NSFSPIR funding during the 80s, in its early years, as a small business, Qualcomm has grown to become a world leader in wireless technologies and particularly 5G, critical technology and industry. So there are many, many examples like that, where the SBIR investments made by NSF has helped those small companies to secure venture capital, grow, and become successful ventures. So it's doing both at the same time. I have one last question for you, and this is about how Tip looks at inclusiveness. And let me just quote from your own documents.

Tip will also nurture STEM talent by focusing on the engagement of populations long underrepresented in STEM, along with broad organizational changes, e.g. at institutions of higher education, and the inclusion of diverse institution types such as minority-serving institutions. Can you give me an idea of how exactly this will work? Absolutely. So as you can imagine, our talent is available all across the nation. And so when you look at institutions, institutions are of various types. We have the research one institutions doing fantastic work in terms of research and the outcomes speak for itself. Then there are the class of institutions that we call them as minority-serving institutions,

historically black colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, tribal colleges, universities, and the R2 institutions. They are all spread across the nation. Some of those minority-serving institutions are also R-1 institutions. Now, talent is everywhere. And therefore, how do you now invest in programs that ensures that all of these talent in all these institutions and community colleges also, how do you lift up all this talent everywhere so that we might then realize the scale up and the speeding up that I talked about of this innovation potential and the acceleration of progress, both economic and societal? And so that's what Tip is focused on. That's what NSF has been focused on.

I just want to be very clear that this is the mission of all of NSF in addition to Tip. and therefore we are taking precise steps in terms of programs designed and sometimes co-created by listening to people from the outside community telling us what is working, what is not working, and therefore we'll be able to plan those programs that can actually be successful. And so that's what we are doing right now. We're also developing at NSF mechanisms for support for those institutions that don't have the infrastructure

to be able to get the ideas that they have, translated into successful proposals and then prevail in the gold standard merit review process of NSF. And that again requires investments made not relying on the institutions to make it themselves because until they reach a critical mass of research activity, they may not have the resources to invest. Just a reminder, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, we're talking to NSF director Sater Rahman-Punchanathan, about a new effort to bring research out of the lab and into the marketplace. I said that was the last question I lied.

I have one more question for you because it's a question about patience. I recently watched a TED talk from four years ago in which the speaker was the chief research and innovation officer at Arizona State University talking about innovation. Do you know who I'm talking about? Yes, yes. I remember looking myself in the middle. It's you, of course. And you said, if you want innovation, what you need is not only celebrating success like we've

been talking about, but celebrating failure too, honoring failure, generating an environment that allows people to fail and fail fast. Do Americans understand that? And when you talk about research and you talk about innovation, that it may take some time, it may take some money that looks wasted, but is really not. That's an excellent point, Ira. you're absolutely correct. So I often talk about the length of time it sometimes takes for even some of these ideas

to be realized, right? So but when you have a portfolio of ideas, some ideas are high-risk ideas, they may fail. And people learn from failures, and failures are the stepping stones to success, as we say. And then they build on the idea, and then they work on it, and then they fail again, and then they build on it again, and then they succeed. And some, we learn a lot from the failures itself. That learning is exceedingly important. as much as the successful outcome itself.

And some ideas may happen translate in a decade's time. Some may take a few years. Some may take several decades. So what I'm trying to do, Ira, is to communicate that by giving examples, examples of things that have taken several decades to realize the ultimate success. Some which take a few decades, and I give examples of that. Let's take AI. AI has been a sustained investment.

We see it today as an exciting technology. Yes, we have lots of challenges like bias, ethics, privacy, security, which we need to solve. But that did not come about just today. It was sustained investments by NSF and other entities for several decades. And here we are potentially enjoying the outcome of the AI-related activities. So it's important that people understand this. And storytelling is important. That's why this interview for me is exceedingly important.

Storytelling is important. I strongly encourage all your listeners. aira, to please go to NSA websites. There are many stories and videos that will explain this even better in terms of people actually talking about their success stories and, you know, you talked about the metrics. One of the things that we are working on as we speak

is working with the board to be able to derive the metrics more concretely. But, you know, as you said earlier, sometimes things can be nailed down in numbers. Sometimes it is storytelling. Sometimes it's anecdotes. Sometimes it is, you know, these failures that we should be able to talk about

and celebrate too. So that's what I'm trying to temper the expectations in a way, that all of this are part of how we measure progress. Well, you know, when I talked about failures, I remember years ago that when a solar project at a big company was failed, because these things happen, that its critics picked it up so heavily and threw it at the government saying, look, look what you're spending a hundred million dollars or more on a failure, not understanding that there are failures that are necessary. Yes, absolutely. I think that comes. culture has to be, absolutely. I think the more successes we're able to point to, people will have, I think, a better tolerance for failures. You talk about patients. You know, sometimes, you know,

when they know the potential and what has been achieved, they are more ready to forgive the failures. So I think we need to do a better job celebrating our successes and also pointing to some of those successes, having failed along the way and then achieve the success. So they'll be able to get a a feeling that success and failure are both two sides of the same coin. Well, we wish you great success in your new Directorate. Thank you so much, and I really appreciate you giving us the time to be able to talk about this. Dr. Seda-Raman Panchanathan is director of the National Science Foundation. He joined us from Washington, D.C.

We have to take a break, and when we come back, a conversation about the importance of measuring snowpack in the Rocky Mountains and why it looks a little different this year. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO.

St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. High in the Rocky Mountains, snow stays piled up long into the spring. And the amount of snow matters a lot for the Colorado River. That river is a lifeline for more than 40 million people across the southwest. and about 70% of the water in it starts as snow. How that snow behaves, how we measure it,

are important factors to the people who depend on it. Joining me today to talk about the importance of the snowpack is Alex Hager, Water in the West Reporter for Public Radio Station, KUNC, based in Fort Collins, Colorado. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks for having me back. It's great to be here. Nice to have you. Okay, let's get right into this.

When you reported this story, you went on an advertisement. adventure up into the mountains to tag along on a snow survey. What is a snow survey? And why does it matter? Yeah, a snow survey is an old school way of finding out how much snow is on the ground. But it is still in practice today. So I went on one with some researchers in Colorado. It is quite a track. First, you've got to drive way out of cell range up into the mountains. Then we strapped on some backcountry skis to get a little deeper into the woods. You're kind of huffing and puffing uphill through the trees. Then we get to the snow survey site. They pull out this long aluminum tube and they plunge it into the snow underfoot. So now you've got this core of snow and then

you can weigh it and measure it. And then an average of those numbers from a few different spots throughout the woods gives you data. So scientists have had a big high-tech network of electronic sensors that have been measuring snow since the 1970s. But they've also been building a huge base of data by doing these manual snow surveys, the exact same way since pretty much the time of the Great Depression, and they've been doing it in the exact same places. That is really useful because we're able to spot long-term trends in this hugely important source of water for the Western U.S., because this water from the snow is flowing a long way away from the mountains. This is Stephen Jowan with the Natural Resources Conservation

Service. He was the guy conducting that snow survey. I think as the West got developed and more and more people showed up and they're using the river, it becomes that much more important as people understand it and know that this water one day is going to feed California avocados or, you know, Mexico cantaloupe or whatever down in that area. And it's kind of a crazy thought when you're deep in the Rocky Mountains, standing on the snow, but we wouldn't have water to grow fresh vegetables in the winter if it weren't for high altitude snowpack. And so what is the snow data telling us about how much water will end up in the Colorado River?

Well, right now, snowpack and most of Colorado is a little below average, but close to it. In other parts of the Colorado River Basin, it's a little lower than that. So Wyoming and Utah, a lot of their mountain ranges are only 70, 80 percent of normal. But this part of the country is in year 23 of drought. So it is not exactly a shock that things are on the drier side. And back-to-back dry years mean that even less water makes it to the river because the soil is so dry, it acts like a sponge, and it soaks up some of that runoff. Basically, this area is in desperate need of some better than average snow seasons, and lately it's been getting the opposite. So what you're telling me now that the data shows that we have less snow now than before?

Yes, in the vast majority of the Mountain West, we are seeing declines in the amount of snow that falls each winter. That is compared with data going back about seven decades. So climate change, making things drier, for sure, but it is also, of course, making things warmer. So it's not just less precipitation, but also different precipitation. I learned a little more about this from Heather Lewin. She's the Science and Policy Director at Roaring For Conservancy. That's a river nonprofit just downstream of the snow survey. So we're seeing more precipitation as rain rather than as snow.

So that means instead of having a savings account, we have a spending account that hits the river and moves quickly versus a savings account that kind of gives us a long-term security. You know, and this is at a time when people are really looking to make. make withdrawals from that savings account. The nation's largest reservoirs are shrinking. There is less snow melt to refill them. And at the same time, you've got homes and businesses from Denver to Phoenix to Vegas to San Diego and everywhere in between depending on that water. Yeah, I understand that now. In your reporting, you mentioned that there was recently a change in the way we understand snow measurements. Tell us more about that, please. Yeah, so this is really interesting. So Noah, the National Oceanic and Atmosphere,

administration, every 10 years, they shift the window we use to calculate averages for all of their weather data, whether that's rain or temperature or, of course, snowpack. So last year, new data was being compared against numbers from 1981 to 2010. Now, the new three-decade window goes from 1991 to 2020. And the past 10 years have been the hottest in the history of America's recorded weather. So when you see this April snow data is like 94% of average, that same amount of snow would have showed up as a smaller number the year before. And that's deceptive. You know, the snowpack data, it's a little bit of wonky stuff, but people see it. These averages are regular reading for skiers and river rafters and in some of the mountain towns near where that snow

falls. Data like that is printed in the newspaper and without proper context, people might lose sight of the way that climate change is really reshaping the world around us. Yeah. For some Some people, it's just, do I go skiing this weekend? For other people, it's weather, it's survival, drinking water. Yeah. Where else do measurement changes show up in climate data? Yeah, they show up everywhere. You know, Noah is one of the top weather offices in the land.

So whether you are somewhere with a lot of rain and snow, not enough rain and snow, really cold lows, really hot highs. If you see any of those numbers displayed as a percentage of average, you're seeing an average now that only goes back into the early 1990s. and you are not seeing the sweeping long-term changes that climate change is bringing to every corner of this country. Again, Heather Lewin. You need to look at the context that you're reading or listening to it in because often there's a bigger picture. The data all tells a story,

and it just depends on the context that we're reading it in. And when it comes to snow, that context is that there is less than there used to be, and that is already having big implications for the Colorado River. Wow, thank you for filling us. in on those implications, Alex. Thanks for having me. Alex Hager, Water in the West reporter for Public Radio Station, KUNC in Fort Collins, Colorado. For the rest of the hour, maybe you've been enjoying the changing seasons, spring getting underway, looking ahead to summer, but what would

that look like on the planet Neptune? Neptune is about 30 times further away from the sun than Earth. Having visited it once with Voyager 2 over 30 years ago, Voyager's showed the planet to be a vibrant shade of azure blue. But Neptune does have a planetary tilt like Earth, meaning it has seasons, and despite being cold and dark, it does have active weather. Researchers have been trying to track how Neptune and other outer system planets change over time, and this week they publish some unusual findings about Neptune. For example, while you might think approaching summer would lead to warmer temperatures, it appears that the planet is actually cooling as it moves toward the summer in the southern hemisphere. Pretty unexpected. Joining me now is one of

the researchers on that project. Michael Roman is a planetary scientist at the University of Leicester in England. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Nice to have you. Let's talk about this unusual finding about Neptune's seasons by first. First explain how you take its temperature. I mean, Neptune is very far away, is it not? Yes, so it's very far away and very cold. So measuring its temperatures is rather difficult. What you need is a very large telescope. Typically the ones we're using are something like 8 meters in diameter. And a very sensitive instrument, basically is a thermal camera hooked up to this telescope to take images of it.

So using these infrared images, you can infer how hot the planet is or how cold the planet is. So your data on Neptune's seasons, looking as summer starts in its southern hemisphere, would be sort of like trying to say something about seasons on Earth when you've only been observing January and part of February. It's not very complete, is what I'm saying. Yeah, no, exactly right. Since it takes 165 years to go around, and we've only really been observing at these infrared wavelengths

for the last 20 years or so, we've only seen a fraction of a season on Neptune. And so we're not exactly sure what we were going to see, because no one has really detected this before. All right. So let's get into the details of what you actually saw about the temperature changes on Neptune. What did you find? Well, basically, we found when you take all the data, all the data in existence that goes back to about 2003, and you look at its brightness as a function of time. We found that it declined somewhat steadily in brightness, which we interpreted as a change in the temperature since 2003. So how much decline in temperature did you see?

So since 2003, we saw a drop of about 8 Kelvin or 8 degrees Celsius into planets' stratosphere. So this is the layer of the atmosphere that is above sort of the active weather layer. We have a stratosphere on Earth, for example, it's where ozone is being produced. Yeah, so that would be unusual, right? Shouldn't you be seeing an increase if it's summertime? Yeah, so naively we would expect with increasing sunlight it's happening in the summer season, then you'd expect the atmosphere to be absorbing this sunlight and warming up over time. But in fact, what the data shows is exactly the opposite.

The planet seems to be getting cooler in the stratosphere over the observed period. And this was definitely a surprise to us because at first glance, it doesn't really make sense. And at second glance, does it make sense? Well, you know, we can come up with theories to try to explain what we're seeing. All we can really do is speculate as to what's happening. what we may be seeing is this complex interplay between solar heating and the sun's effect on the chemistry of the atmosphere. Basically, sunlight is absorbed in the atmosphere by methane that's in Neptune's atmosphere. Atmosphere is mostly hydrogen and helium, but there's a small amount of methane.

That methane very effectively absorbs sunlight, and that heats the atmosphere. But also, the sun can damage these methane molecules. You can get high-energy photons, UV light from the sun, can break up these little methane molecules into other hydrocarbons, mostly ethane. And these other hydrocarbons tend to not absorb sunlight, but they tend to radiate heat very effectively. They're very efficient coolers.

And so what we might be seeing is, as the sunlight increased over time on Neptune, there was a heating due to the sun's energy directly falling down to here, but there was also production of these hydrocarbons that effectively cooled the atmosphere. And so perhaps the production of ethane offset the amount of heating due to direct sunlight. And overall, that would lead to a cooling in the atmosphere. Now, I understand that in the images, in addition to seeing this cooling effect, you noticed a bright hotspot by the South Pole.

Any idea what's going on there? Yeah, so this is really interesting. So as the whole planet on average was cooling down, we saw this brightening, this localized right at the South Pole, this little hot polar vortex. What's going on there is not exactly clear because in general we thought that the atmosphere at the pole would be warmer because air tends to converge and sink there. When air sinks, it warms. We get this on Earth, for example, when wind blows down mountain sides and get these Santa Ana winds, for example. And we thought perhaps that's what we're seeing there at the pole. in combination with perhaps a seasonal effect where this says the pole is now pointing more towards the sun, it's getting more sunlight and it should warm up.

The problem is that we saw these changes very abruptly occurring. This between 2018 and 2020, the whole southern pole region warmed by 11 Kelvin on average or 11 degrees Celsius. That was unexpected to have such a rapid response on Neptune given how slowly the seasons change was surprising. Over the course of a full orbital cycle or difference between summer and winter on Neptune, I expect the change as large as maybe 15 degrees. And here we're seeing a change of 11 degrees and just a mere fraction of a season. So it's really quite surprising to see. Am I reflato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

This all says to me that our existing models of how Neptune's atmosphere behaves or should behave, well, those models are all wrong or need to be changed. Yeah, you know, exactly. This just happens all the time in science. It points to a picture of seasonal response or at least temporal variability on Neptune that is just more complicated than we previously expected. You mentioned that you don't have enough data about Neptune.

Will the new James Webb Telescope help you collect more data? Oh, absolutely. So James Webb Telescope is really going to be a game changer in a lot of ways because it is so much more sensitive to the atmosphere of Neptune than anything we had before and anything we can get from the ground at the moment. Also, it's a lot bigger than the Spitzer Space Telescope, which in the past observed Neptune. The Spitzer was only really able to resolve Neptune as one or two pixels on its chip,

whereas James Webb Space Telescope is large enough to be able to resolve the disk, and so we're going to be able to make maps of the temperature and the chemistry over the entire disk. and this will be unprecedented, the amount of data will get, will allow us to better understand what exactly it is we're seeing on Neptune at this moment in time. Yeah, you sound very excited about Neptune. Well, you know, it is an intriguing planet, I find.

I mean, the fact that it is so far out there in the solar system, if you look at it for your backyard telescope, I remember the first time I looked at it at Forteus Observatory on Cornell's campus through a telescope there, and it was just a little tiny blue disc in the sky. And yet out there on the edge of the solar system has some of the most active weather, the strongest winds of any planet in the solar system. And this is all still rather mysterious to us. And it's really one of the least explored bodies in the entire solar system.

Should we be sending another probe by it? Oh, absolutely. There's only so much one can learn about Neptune from here on Earth over four billion kilometers away. Essentially, you're only seeing the side of Neptune that's pointed towards us, for example. So we don't really know what's going on on the North Pole Neptune. In fact, you haven't seen the North Pole of Neptune from Earth since the 1960s. And so if you want to say something about how the planet overall is changing, you need to also look at the other side of planet we can't see.

But there's also a lot more to Neptune than just the atmosphere itself. It has rings. It has moons. Triton, its largest moons, is perhaps a captured body, a captured Khyberbell object that's brought to orbit around Neptune. And in itself is fascinating. It has probably a subsurface ocean. covered in a layer of ice and it seems to have geysers.

In order to observe these, you really have to get up close in some cases. And also just to understand the interior to planet bitter, you really need to have a sense of its distribution of mass in the planet. And that can only really be acquired by getting up close to it and detecting how its gravity field is shaped. In addition, you need to know about its composition a little more carefully. And you really can only say so much about the composition of the planet remotely from observing it from afar.

At the end of the day, you need to get a probe into the atmosphere in order to measure things like the noble gas quantities. And these are important because they can tell us something about the formation and the history of these planets and how they came to be. Dr. Roman, I'm with you on this. Neptune is quite fascinating, gorgeous, and deserves more attention. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. That's my pleasure. Thank you. Dr. Michael Roman, planetary scientist at the University of Lester, smack dab in the middle of of England. And that's about all the time we have for this hour. If you missed any part of the

program or you would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. And on the SciFri Vox Pop app, we're looking ahead to Earth Day. And we want to know what are you or your community doing to take action? Something big or something small, tell us on the Science Friday Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.