Science Friday - Ocean Migrations, Deep Divers, Summer Skies. April 20, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: April 20, 2018

Every night, the largest migration on Earth happens underwater, as jellies, crustaceans and fish swim up hundreds of meters towards the surface to feed. Those daily pilgrimages might also create propulsive jets behind the animals capable of stirring ocean waters, according to research in the journal Nature. Stanford engineer John Dabiri and his team investigated that phenomenon in the lab using brine shrimp (commonly known as sea monkeys). He joins Ira to discuss the theory. Plus: Consider the spleen. Many may not appreciate or even think about them very much at all, unless they’ve had them removed, but the Bajau people of Southeast Asia rely on them every day without even knowing it. The Bajau are “sea nomads,” meaning they get everything they need to live by diving up to 65 feet under water, multiple times, for up to 8 hours a day. But it’s not their large lung capacity that give them an advantage during a dive—it’s their extra large spleens. Dr. Melissa Ilardo, post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Molecular Medicine at the University of Utah, and Dr. Cynthia Beall, Professor of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University, join Ira to discuss the spleen and other evolutionary adaptations that allow humans to survive in extreme environments. And it’s been a hard road getting there this year, but spring is finally in the air in much of the country. And that means summer is not far away, bringing with it warmer temperatures and lazy nights made for stargazing. Dean Regas, outreach astronomer at the Cincinnati Observatory and co-host of the PBS series ‘Star Gazers,’ joins Ira to talk about some of the highlights of the summer night skies, from planets to constellations to meteor showers. 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 Ira Flato. We're coming to you today from the studios of Cincinnati Public Radio and beautiful downtown Cincinnati. But later at the hour, scientists have uncovered a new reason to appreciate your spleen. Think about that. But first, think of the Earth's great migrations. There are thundering herds of wildebeest on the savannah. That may come to mind. Or delicately fluttering swarms of monarch butterflies. Sandhill cranes, gracefully sweeping through the plane. But the largest migration on Earth, I bet you don't know where that happens. It happens every day, and it's far less glamorous or photographed than those other migrations. But it may have big consequences for the world's oceans if my next guest's hunch turns out to be right.

John DeBeri is a professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University. Welcome back, Dr. DeBeri. Thanks for having me back. Oh, giant ocean migration. Take us into this underwater world. Will you tell us about this migration? Absolutely. So right now somewhere on Earth, it's about sunset,

and that means there's going to be millions or even billions of tiny organisms making their way up to the surface. And they do this largely to feed, we think, but also to feed while avoiding predators seeing them in action. And as they make those large migrations over hundreds of meters in some cases, it turns out that they're moving a lot of water with them. And so in our research, we wanted to understand how that movement of water could potentially impact much larger scales

than the tiny organisms themselves. So you set up an experiment to model this, right? We did. It would be nice to do this directly in the ocean for starters. But first of all, we didn't know exactly what to look for in terms of how the animals affect the water. But also in the ocean, we'd only get one shot at this per day. And so that adds up when the ship time could be $20, $25,000 a day. So instead, what we did was to use lasers in the lab to trick animals,

brine shrimp in particular, into making these vertical migrations dozens of times a day on demand. Yeah, and we have some of these amazingly colorful videos and photos of your work up on our website at sciencefrily.com slash seam monkeys. ScienceFriety.com slash sea monkeys. So I was looking at the videos. It's beautiful. So you get these sea monkeys in a column of water, sort of like a cylinder of water, going up and down, and you're mimicking what goes on in the ocean, and seeing how much mixing the ocean does?

That's right. So these animals, even though they don't occur in the ocean, they swim very much like some of the very common organisms, what we call krill, also copepods, basically think little shrimp-like organisms that occur by the billions in the ocean. And they occur in many sensitive parts of the ocean, like what's called the Southern Ocean near Antarctica. And so what we wanted to do in the lab was to see as these animals migrate how much water they're moving around. And it turns out that it's quite a large amount. How large is it, as they like to say? Right.

So there's a couple of ways to think about it. One is how much mixing are they doing and how fast do they mix the water column. And so what we found is that they mix a thousand times faster than what would happen by just molecular diffusion alone. So think of your coffee in the morning. if you were to pour the milk in and just let it sit, molecular diffusion would eventually mean that milk ends up pretty much everywhere in the cup, but it might take about 15 minutes for that to happen. The shrimp, on the other hand, are mixing that same amount in about one second.

So that's one second versus 15 minutes, a huge increase in activity due to their motion. Now, is there any way for you now that you know this, to go out in the ocean and actually find them and measure them somehow, that's circulation? Absolutely. And so one of the big findings from, our lab experiments is that there's a very key signature of their motion. And it's as they swim upward, they create a very powerful downward jet of water. And that's something that we can measure

from a ship using acoustics. So basically sending sound waves down into the water, we can actually measure this effect. And so we're hoping to collaborate with some excellent scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, which is out here on the West Coast. They have assets that allow them to measure both the animals, but also the flow that they create. And so do you think that this has gone, since it's gone unmeasured with these animals doing this every day, that it needs to be put into a larger equation of how our world works and what's going on with the environment? We think it could be quite important for a few reasons. A colleague of mine, Bill Dewar at Florida State several years ago,

estimated that the amount of power that is associated with these migrations is comparable to the winds and the tides, which are really the two factors that oceanographers currently understand to dictate how the ocean moves. So because there's so much energy associated with these migrations, and because this motion of the flow that they're creating could move around nutrients, it could be helping sequester carbon that we emit, it's certainly something that we need to look into as to another factor in climate models, for example. I see. So if you're making your model about climate, you need to add in the factor that there's this mixing of the oceans caused by.

these life forms. Potentially so. Now, if you talk to an oceanographer, they'll start pulling out their hair a little bit because the question is, how do I incorporate these little tiny centimeter scale organisms in these models that typically only have a pixel size, if you will, of tens of kilometers.

So that's a tricky thing to figure out. And before they want to start really dealing with that, I think they'll want better evidence in the field, those ship-based measurements, for example, to be sure that it's real. But the reason we're confident that this, this is a real effect, is that the physics are actually pretty straightforward as to how these animals swim and create this flow. Do you need to do more research in your lab about this before you go out and start trying to measure it?

Well, we've actually done quite a bit over the past several years. In fact, I think our last conversation many years ago was centered around that mechanism of creating the animal migrations in a laboratory setting. And over those past several years, what we've done is to really refine our understanding of how the animals interact with the water. So the real questions now are if we're not using these brine shrimp, which again we use for the ability to trick them into swimming in the lab, if instead we're interested in the various organisms in the ocean, the krill, salps, these gelatinous organisms, and others, testing those, we really have to go into the field to make those measurements. You know, it reminds me of experiments done in a glass of beer with the bubbles,

showing the bubbles go up. And you know what I'm talking about? I do, and colleagues of mine, Howard Stone, and others, I know have done really interesting research in that space. And so that's sort of the same thing. Where, besides Antarctica, where would we find? If we wanted to look for this stuff, where in other oceans would we find it? Well, this is the exciting thing. These organisms of various species are migrating everywhere. So somewhere around the Earth right now, it's near sunset, which means these migrations are happening as we speak.

So we can go just not too far from the Stanford campus on the west coast of the U.S. to see them in Monterey Bay. They're found down in San Diego, in the North Atlantic, in the Southern Ocean, as I mentioned. So they're pretty much everywhere. The challenge is they are, in many cases, quite deep in the ocean, and much of what we know about the ocean is limited to the upper few meters. So it really, again, emphasizes the importance of more study of our oceans here on Earth. Yeah, because we always say we know more about the backside of the moon than we know about

some of the deepest parts of our oceans. It's very true. And, you know, as you said at the top, you know, maybe these migrations aren't as glamorous as the herds of Buffalo. I kind of disagree. I think if we could actually get pictures of these more frequently, people would be pretty amazed at the choreography that happens as they're migrating. Now, you were targeted by Tom Coburn as being wasteful research.

How do you react to that? That's correct. You know, in general, as an academic, you can't be afraid of criticism. it would be kind of like, I guess, a boxer afraid of taking a punch. So it's part and parcel of what you do. But I think what was frustrating about the senator's criticism is that I don't think he took much time to really understand the science. And so in this particular case, as I mentioned earlier,

the laboratory demonstrations developing that laser-based technique actually saved the taxpayers a lot of money. Those shipboard experiments being tens of thousands of dollars a day became a few hundred dollars in the laboratory. And they've given us now enough information to make a more meaningful search in the ocean. So I'm hoping now that this paper in nature is out, maybe he'll revisit his opinion

and maybe some of your listeners can send him a copy. You know, sometimes it's not really about the fact. It's about politics. That's of course true. It didn't matter what you did. It is true. And that's disappointing. I think what I try to encourage my students,

for example, in the laboratory is to keep focusing on doing good science, and at the end of the day, I think that'll win the argument. Do you have, are there, is this a good ripe field for graduate students to go into? Absolutely. It's very interdisciplinary, meaning it's involving biology, fluid dynamics, ocean science, data science, figuring out how, as you mentioned earlier, how do we incorporate this into computational models of the earth? So really any student who's interested in any branch of science will find some interesting work here. And in addition, like we said earlier,

There's still so much that we don't understand about the ocean, so you're guaranteed to discover something new almost every day. Can we do this at home since it involves those sea monkeys, you know, the little tiny shrimp? This is not an experiment we could set up at home and try it. Well, you actually could. You know, I hadn't thought about it until just now, so let's think it through. We'd have to get the sea monkeys, which you can get from a pet store. And if you had a laser pointer at home, if you shine that into a glass of water that

these animals are in, you can at least see them respond to the light in the same way that we do in the laboratory. So that might be a simple do-it-yourself experiment to get a sense of how these animals swim together. But in the overall picture, as you say, more research we need to know about this because it would affect the current models of how the ocean works, right? That's right. If it's not factored in. In many ways. So, you know, we're talking about these climate effects, which may be a bit longer term. But remember, 40% of the world's population lives with, about, what, 50 miles of the coast? And so they have direct impacts on the ocean

in terms of overfishing, pollution. And if these animals are indeed forcing the ocean or, you know, causing motion that's important to how the world functions, how the ocean functions, then those are effects that we need to be incorporating or else we're really underestimating the impacts of things like overfishing and acidification of the ocean.

And you talk about these are hotspots. Could there be many more hotspots that we don't know about where there's stuff. Absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, most of our understanding of where these animals occurs is sort of fortuitous. You'll have a crew that's on a boat actually doing some other activity like mapping the ocean floor surface, and what they'll find is that these aggregations are sort of noise in their measurement signals. So there haven't been a lot of concerted efforts to do the comprehensive global mapping that really is required here. But hopefully this work can help stimulate that. Well, Dr. DeBerry, thank you for taking time to be with us and joining us

Again, is a really interesting, very, very interesting work to look at. Dr. John DeBerry's professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford, and his study appears in the journal Nature this week. And as I say before, we have some really amazing, colorful videos and photos of this work. Up at our website, sciencefriety.com slash sea monkeys. ScienceFriety.com slash sea monkeys. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato.

How often do you think about your spleen? And maybe when you hear of someone who, who's had it removed. Doesn't feel like a particularly useful organ, but the Baja people of Southeast Asia rely on their spleen every day without even knowing it. The Bajiao are sea nomads. They get everything they need to live by, by diving, holding their breath multiple times for up to eight hours a day. Sometimes they can go down as much as 200 feet. You think they must have very large lungs to do that. But in fact, it's their extra large splice. that give them an advantage during a dive.

Joining me to talk more about this, a new research, is Melissa Elardo, former researcher at the University of Copenhagen, now in the Department of Molecular Medicine at the University of Utah. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me. I want to invite our listeners if they have questions about super spleen or other adaptations for living in extreme environments to set us a tweet at SciFri. You know, we don't think about our spleen much, do we? The average person. Yeah, we really don't.

It's kind of a bizarre organ, because as you said, sometimes it gets taken out, so it seems like we can live without it, so how important could it really even be? Yeah, so tell us why it's so important to the Bajiao people. Yeah, so it turns out that one of the things that the spleen does is that it stores oxygenated red blood cells. And so this is useful when you're diving because there's something called the human dive response, and that's actually triggered by holding your breath and being in the water. And what happens is your heart rate slows down, your blood vessels constrict, and then your spleen contracts. And so this gives you an oxygen boost.

So in a way, it's kind of like a biological scuba tank. That's interesting because diving is really important to their culture, isn't it? It is, yeah. It's a huge part of their life. Traditionally, they're traveling around in these houseboats and getting everything they need from the sea. So you needed to measure the size of their spleen, right, to know that they're going to be. bigger. How did you go about doing that? Yeah, so, well, so I didn't want to just show up and say, hey, can I measure your spleen? So I started with an initial visit. Yeah, exactly. It was already

kind of weird that I was coming out of nowhere, but I went on an initial visit just to introduce myself and introduce the science and make sure that they really understood it and were interested to participate. And so on my second trip, once they had kind of opened up to the idea, I brought a portable ultrasound machine with me and I took ultrasound images of their spleen. And how did you know it was a genetic adaptation that occurred and not just a mechanical change? You know, if you use your muscles, your muscles get bigger. Maybe if you use your spleen more, it just gets bigger. Yeah, exactly.

That was something we really wanted to clear up early on. And so we took measurements both from Bajo divers as well as Bajo non-divers. And so that we were able to see that their spleens were approximately the same size. So this indicates that if there's something going on, it is happening at a genetic level rather than a plastic or response to the activity of diving. Could you have a genetic adaptation that happened so quickly over a period of hundreds of years? I don't know, maybe thousands. Yeah, we're not actually sure how long they've been diving, so it's hard to say.

But yeah, we really know very little about how long it takes for these kinds of adaptations to occur, but it seems like it's been long enough for the Bajo. Yeah, now I want to bring on another guess because this is not the only example of modern humans undergoing a genetic change to adapt to life with less oxygen. I want to bring in my next guest, Cynthia Bell. She is Professor of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University, also in Cleveland. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you.

Now, I understand you study Tibetan people who are able to live at higher altitudes without suffering from the effects of hypoxia. How are they able to do that? Well, they have adapted both physiologically and genetically. Like Melissa, we're interested in linking the physiology and the genetics. And one of the surprising things about Tibetans is that they live at high altitudes without the high levels of hemoglobin that you or I would get if we were living at high altitude. or that the Andean highlanders have at the high altitudes. So they have an unexpected biological response in the sense of not having much of a hemoglobin response.

And we've been able to link that to a genetic locus called EPAS1 that associates with the lack of response of hemoglobin. So we have a genetic locus and a biological response. And so what does the genetic locus do for them? How does it make them do this? Yeah. What the genetic locus does is it basically turns down the hemoglobin response that you or I would have or that an Andean Highlander has. So it turns down the whole pathway leading from an oxygen.

sensor to erythropoitin, the hormone that initiates the production of red blood cells full of hemoglobin. So in Tibetans, that whole pathway is turned down, dampened. Interesting. So what happens to a person who doesn't have this genetic adaptation like me, you or I, if we tried to live with the Tibetans for a year? Well, I've done that. Many others have done that. Tell us. Tell us. Yes, tell us. Well, we maintain the high hemoglobin concentration, and, you know, our blood is a little bit thicker. It flows a little slower. You and I would also then develop some pulmonary hypertension because our heart is working hard against our lungs to push that sluggish blood around.

And the Tibetans do not have that pulmonary hypertension and the extra. work on their heart. Melissa, let's talk about the back to the badjao now. Do we know with being deprived of oxygen on these dives? Maybe they have any other effects, any long-term effects? In terms of long-term physiological effects, we haven't really had a chance to look into that yet, but seeing them, they seem like very healthy, fit people.

But they do also have a number of other adaptations, it seems, to this dive diving activity. Such as? So one gene that we identified that's been under selection is this gene BDKRB2, and that has to do with the vasoconstriction response that I mentioned that happens while you're diving. So it seems like they have an increased ability to constrict their blood vessels in order to preserve oxygenated blood for their heart and their lungs and their brain. Is this something that other diving mammals or animals have also,

that basically we're mimicking what baby a seal does? Yeah, definitely in the case of the spleen. That was one of the first clues that that was something that we should target in our search, because species of diving seals that can hold their breath for longer than other species of seals have been shown to have these disproportionately large spleen. And it's been hypothesized that that gives them an advantage in diving. Now, Cynthia, if we know that the spleen is involved in breathing here for the Bajiao, perhaps the Tibetans may have something.

Maybe did they have a larger spleen? perhaps that would help them breathe at a higher altitude? I have no idea. I have never seen a measure of spleen size for high altitude populations. Go back with your machine and go measure that. Well, yes. Please come with us to the field. Yeah, yeah.

Okay, okay. That's a plan. I did hear from someone this morning who is, along with me, attending a conference on hypoxia, that he had looked at spleen size in deer mice who live at a range of altitudes here in the U.S. And he said that at least the hypoxic deer mice do not have enlarged spleens. So we have one species there for you to compare with. Yeah, one reason I would say that might be the case, too, is that the Tibetans are undergoing chronic hypoxia,

so they're constantly living at these lower levels of oxygen. whereas in the Bajo, it's this very acute hypoxia. So we might expect there to be different adaptations to these different conditions. Well, let me just turn that around. Go ahead. I'm sorry. No, I was going to say I agree completely that the nature of the stress is very different at high altitude and in diving. And so I agree that we would expect the adaptations to likely be very different. So we would think in general that some sort of stress in any way might lead to some sort of genetic difference over the years.

Maybe not hypoxia, maybe not having the diving. How about we folks who are living with stress all the time in our lives? Might we be developing some sort of genetic mutation for those who handle it better? Well, one thing that we need is for natural selection to work is something that's either killing you or that's making you have more children. So I'm not sure. Yeah, yeah. Maybe stress is killing us, but maybe not as quickly as diving, because diving can actually be extremely dangerous.

Right, right. Let me go in the opposite direction now, Cynthia. If the Tibetan people were to come down from their mountain and try to live at sea level for a year, would they have any trouble doing that? Would they be getting too much oxygen now if they're not used to all this oxygen? No. It seems from what little we know that the Tibetans'

do just find at low altitude. Their responses to altitude, when there are at altitude, are dampened, and the response to the relief from hypoxia don't seem to bother them at all. Melissa, let's talk more about the spleen, because I promised my listeners that we wouldn't learn everything we could. Sure. It's an organ that we said before, it's an organ that does not get a lot of recognition. So tell us what does this.

purpose? Yeah, it's completely underappreciated, I think. But it seems to be this contraction is not only happening in diving, but it also happens during physical activity to a lesser extent. So that could be, generally it's acting as this reservoir for oxygenated red blood cells. But it's also involved in the immune response to certain bacteria. And tell me more about that. I hadn't heard about that. That's not something I've looked into so much because I've been mostly focused on dive component, but yeah. Yeah, so I'm going to just think out a lot.

Maybe our spleen has a microbiome in it also? It absolutely could. Keeps it healthy. We know that the larger spleenes make the Bajiao better divers, but could it give them other super abilities? Like, could they be better athletes because they have a bigger spleen? You know, run long-distance race is better. Yeah, that's certainly something we're interested in,

especially because another animal that's often talked about in terms of the physiology of the spleen is the horse. And it's thought that the spleen in horses is so large because it has something to do with their running and their running capabilities. So it could be that there's something to do with athletic performance generally in spleen size. You know, Cynthia, we've heard of athletes going to higher levels, you know, I mean, altitudes like Mexico City, whatever, to train because it affects their blood. They used to call it blood doping, things like that. Could there be spleen doping? Melissa, where you practice for years underwater. Well, yeah, I've already been asked.

And get your spleen to get bigger. Yeah. So we actually found that the spleen size, the difference, we believe, is at least in part attributable to these higher levels of the thyroid hormone T4. And so I've already been asked if people could inject themselves with T4 to get this bigger spleen. And I say, no, please don't do that. Because there are a lot of health consequences associated with hyperthyroid. so we're not exactly sure what's happening in terms of the physical consequences of this relationship

between the thyroid hormone and spleen size. You don't want a mean spleen. No, certainly not. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Am I reflator talking about our spleen, of all things like with the Melissa Ilardo of the University of Utah and Cynthia Bell of Case Western Reserve. How did you get into studying the spleen? Why do you go to medical school or whatever? He'd say, I want to study the spleen.

How does that happen? Yeah, it was kind of an accidental discovery. So first I heard about the sea nomads, and that was what I was interested in, because I thought this seems like a really interesting possibility for studying natural selection. And then I started looking into the physiology of diving. And that was when I came across the dive response, a component of which, as I said before, is this contraction of the spleen. And so the studies that I had seen to do with the spleen contraction mostly talked about seals

and how the seals that can die for longer have these larger spleens. So yeah, it wasn't really something I spent a lot of time thinking about before I started this research. I wasn't even really sure where it was or what it did before, but now I'm a big fan. And you, Cynthia, how did you get involved in this? I got involved. Yeah, go ahead. You mean in studying evolution or studying? high altitude. High altitudes?

Well, both. High altitudes. I got involved when I was in graduate school studying how people adapt to the environment and, you know, various students chose various environments and I liked high altitude. And it's a fun environment partly because it's a chronic stress. It's chronic and unavoidable and everyone at a given altitude has the same stress, which makes it very different from the dive response, which is an interesting contrast. Yeah. Let me see if I can get a quick call in from Tempe, Arizona. Alicia, welcome to Science Friday. Hi. So I went to Peru a few years ago. I was working there for five months, and I started feeling really terrible all the time. Eventually, I go to Lake Tidicaca, and I felt awful. I mean, I'm only 23, like I should have been able to do, like, the activities

that were there, and then I came back to the U.S. It turns out that I had severe anemia. I wound up in the hospital with a hemoglobin of five, and I had to get two blood transfusions and iron transfusions. So my question is, why wasn't I able to, I felt the worst of it was when I was at Lake Tudicaca. Why wasn't I able to do more? Because if I had less hemoglobin, shouldn't I have been able to be more active?

Well, Alicia, you know, we don't try to give out personal medical advice. But I'll ask the last our experts to see if they have an idea here. Any idea? What happened to her? No? I defer to Cynthia. Well, I was going to defer to you. Oh, no.

But I wouldn't. Well, the first question is, why were you anemic? Because a hemoglobin of five is well below the average of 13 and a half or 14 that would be expected for a young, adult woman here at low altitude. So I don't think it had anything to do with your ability to respond to altitude. It had something to do with what was causing you to become anemic. And I'm glad you got over it. So where do you go with your research from here? What else do you want to know? Who are you talking to? Melissa? Okay. Well, so there are a lot of different.

So we identified a number of, as I mentioned, genes that have been under selection in the Bajo that we haven't that weren't associated with spleen size. And so we'd definitely like to look to look into some of the physiological effects of those adaptations. There was the one I mentioned that had to do with vasoconstriction, but then we also found something that seems to have to do with the regulation of carbon dioxide in the blood. And this is interesting for diving because when you hold your breath, what triggers you to want to breathe isn't actually dangerously low oxygen, but rather the buildup of carbon dioxide. So it could be that there's something going on there in the body. But also the bojo aren't the only senomads.

So there are a number of other se nomad populations in Southeast Asia. I've got to say goodbye because I've asked too many good questions, I think. Melissa Lider, Department of Molecular Medicine and University of Utah, Cynthia Bell, Professor of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University. I love when I run out of time because we're getting into good stuff. Thank you both for taking time to be with us. We'll be right back after this break with Dean Regan. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Did you know that Saturday is astronomy day? And it comes at a great time because spring is in the air and that means warmer temperatures and more comfortable conditions for nighttime stargazing. And I just got a new telescope. I upgraded my telescope. I've been waiting to get it outside. And, you know, it's great that I'm coming to you from the Cincinnati Public Radio Studios in Cincinnati because I have with me, Dean Regis, who is the outwe.

reach astronomer at Cincinnati Observatory. You may also know him as the co-host of Stargazers on PBS. Always good to talk with you, Dean. Oh, thanks so much for coming to Cincinnati. We're glad to have you here in Telescope Town. You have the country's first observatory, right? Exactly, yeah. So we have one of the oldest telescopes in the whole world.

It was, I had to saw first light 1845. So we just had its 173rd birthday. It's this beautiful telescope made out of wood and brass, 11 inches in diameter, 16 foot long, gorgeous scope, and it's just a joy to look through it. And is this a good week to look through a telescope? Well, boy, we've got a lot going on. The Venus is up in the sky after sunset, so maybe you've been seeing this extraterrestrial looking light up in the sky as the sun gets into sunsets. It's actually the time where we get a lot of UFO calls.

And I have to put on my, it's only Venus, it's only Venus, it's only Venus. And so that's going on right now. And then we're getting ready for Jupiter season to kick off soon. So lots to go on this summer. Now, I noticed last night was a crescent moon, right? And people think, oh, I'll wait for the full moon, but that's the worst time. Actually, you're right. Yeah, I mean, the full moon is one of the worst things to try to look at with the telescope.

When we point our telescope at the inside observatory at the full moon, it's blinding. You are like, you can see that moon for the next 10 minutes in your eyes. So, yeah, it's the best when you can see where the dark meets the light part of the moon. And so even if the moon's halfway lit up or crescent, and that area is called the Terminator. And so you want to always look for the Terminator on the Moon. That's where you see the most details. And that's because you have long shadows. It gives a three-dimensional feel to it.

Exactly, exactly. And so I like to think of when you're looking through that telescope, like how the first people, when they looked in through telescopes, they saw the moon has all these features and these mountains and these valleys. And you can see them. And so we showed some of your crew the moon last night. Yeah, they had a great time. And, you know, I said, it looks like. like a bad movie set, doesn't it? Yeah, it looks like plaster of Paris, but it's the real thing. It's

awesome. And there is really something, how shall I put it, indescribable. You can look at pictures and movies of things, but when you actually see the real thing through a telescope. Oh, there's so much power to that. That's the biggest kick I get of working at the observatory is that when people put their eyes up to the telescopes, their face literally lights up, because that light is coming through this telescope through all those miles, and it is, because we could put cameras on the telescopes and we could plug that camera into a TV monitor and people could watch it down in the warmth of a room. But there's just something about seeing it with your own eyes. Even with my little eight-inch telescope, it's the first time I saw the moons of Jupiter,

I said, this is what the Galileo so exciting. Exactly. Really? You get that same excitement. Yeah. And that's so great. And you point it yourself. That's the other thing. It's like, okay, so I got this telescope and I'm aiming it at that light and that, I just figured out what that light is. Wasn't that so cool? It was absolutely. And some of the rings of Saturn, when they're tilted the right way, it's life change. I mean, it is. I'm a geek, I'm a geek out on this.

It's just really life-changing. I agree. I mean, that's Saturn's what got me. When I pointed a little four-and-a-half-inch reflector telescope at Saturn, and I said, are you kidding me? That can't be the real thing. It just looks like a sticker on the end of the telescope. And so that's what we're hoping people this summer really take advantage of the planet. because we've got Jupiter starting.

Give me a schedule. I got my telescope. I want to go out. What should I look for in what order? Oh, so this is Venus season. So you catch Venus right after sunset. But you're not going to see you a lot. That's true.

Yeah, Venus is one of the less impressive ones, at least at this time of year, because it looks just like a very bright egg-shaped thing. You want to catch Venus when it's actually a crescent shape. So that'll be later on in the summer and even in early fall. You'll see it as a big crescent-looking moon. but Jupiter's coming up it'll be closest to us in May

so you'll be able see that up and then Saturn comes closest to us in June and this summer Saturn is going to be tilted so much Oh is that right? See the rings to this maximum tilt So that's a good one for beginner If you're a beginner

Take a look at Saturn because the rings will be tilting right at you Absolutely and you can If you have a good enough telescope you'd see the gaps in the rings called Cassini's Division You could see several moons Oh, don't get me going.

I'm sorry. I'm already thinking it. But then the big news, probably the summer that shouldn't overshadow Saturn, because Saturn's definitely the best, is Mars. Mars is coming closest to the Earth July 27th of this year. I'm writing that down. July 27th, and it'll be the closest it's been since the infamous close pass of 2003 when it was as close as Mars ever gets.

So this is about as good as it gets. And that date July 27th is going to be huge in the news because there's also a lunar eclipse that day. There's also a full moon that day. Unfortunately, the lunar eclipse is not visible from the United States, but it's going to be in the news. And so the correlation of a giant moon plus Mars at its closest, this is what I live for, when the media is going to pick up on stuff like this.

Wow. Now, let's backtrack a little because we're both trying to geek out too fast. You also have a book out called A Hundred of Things to See in the Night's Sky, which is a fantastic book. Oh, thank you. You know, for beginning astronomers and the amateurs, you go through, because we all want to know how to be first things to look at. Exactly. And so my book is just basically kind of, kind of schedule, it goes through how I got started in the first place.

I started as, I didn't know anything about the night sky. I started working a planetarium, and they said, here's the keys of the planetarium. You have to learn how to do it. And I just dove in and learned all I could. And so this book kind of gets you started from the basics. How do you identify major stars and constellations? And then we go on to planets, and then we go on to satellites and meteor showers and eclipses, too. And, you know, when you walked in, you gave me a copy of the book.

I didn't want to tell you I already had a copy. Because I'm going to keep the second copy. I'll sign this one for it. Oh, that's great. Because, you know, you got it around a house. You know, because when you see something, you want to run outside and pick up the book and you want it to have it right where you are. Oh, yeah.

And it has some star charts in it so you can identify where you can find these things in the sky. And for folks in the listening to the Southern Hemisphere, my Southern Hemisphere version comes out in June. It's a different sky, right? Oh, man, it's so fun learning the Southern sky, too. But this one's for the Northern sky. And, yeah, 100 things see in the night sky. Those are the top 100, and almost all of them can be found with the naked eye.

If you have your telescope, point at all of them, they look even better. A good pair of binoculars will work, too? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, binoculars. I really recommend that for folks to get started because they're portable, They're easy to use, and you can see so much extra stuff with that. Now, how do you shop for one? What power?

People say, I want to get the highest power, right? That's what they advertise. I have to admit it, size matters when this comes. The bigger, the binoculars, the better. But you can also get some that have coatings on them. Good starter ones are called 10 by 50s. So they magnify 10 times, and the lenses are 50 millimeters in diameter. That's a good place to start.

This is a wide lenses. Not those tiny little horse-raising binoculars. No, you kind of want bigger. And then you can get up to 15 by 70s and then just strap two telescopes together. I don't know if you want to go that. Get out a pair of opera glasses. There you go. Let's talk about what happened.

There's some interesting stuff happened. This week we had the launch of NASA's test mission. Oh, yeah. Which happened on Wednesday. Why is that important? Well, so I think that is the biggest field right now in astronomy is finding exoplanets. And that's what this test mission is going to do. It's going to kind of pick up where the Kepler space mission's going on right now.

It's finding these planets orbiting around other stars. And, I mean, it is just a fascinating field that we're finding so many planets around other stars. Even as optimistic as I am, I thought there's no way we're going to find thousands of planets. And they've already found 3,000. This one is going to hopefully find tens of thousands. And the more planets out there, the more places we can look at and dream of going. Wow. And there's another mission launching soon.

to Mars? Is there a window, sort of? Is that why? We have to wait, right, for the right time? Exactly, yeah. So Mars is going to be its closest approach in July. If we want to launch a spacecraft there, we have to do it in these launch windows that happen about every two years or so. And so it's going to launch in May, get there in November, and it's going to join a whole fleet of spacecraft. It's another rover? Yes, it's another rover, another lander. Wait, another lander. I don't know rover. But right now there's still seven orbiters there on Mars and two rovers roll. And so Mars is well covered right now.

Wow. So it's going to get there. If you launch it now, go at November or something? Yeah, so November is the time. So about six months because this is a closer approach. The farther approaches, well, then it's either seven or eight months. And so, you know, we have the landers and the rovers there sort of scratching around with little, is this going to scratch or is going to go try to figure out what's underneath everything?

Boy, this one, I can't remember what the. whole what their plan is with this one. But yeah, the story on the rovers, I mean, I can't believe that opportunity rover is still rolling. It landed there in 03 or 04. And it's still going. I mean, passed its 90-day warranty, that's for sure. It's not a three-hour tour. Now, of course, this time of year, there's always a meteor shower. Yes. Big one? Get excited? Oh, boy. Well, okay, so this is where we have to dial things back a lot. The best meteor shower of the year is predicted to be the Perseid meteor shower. That's the one that always comes August 12th and 13th.

Every year, I like the Perseans a lot because August. Staying up late at night in August is a lot better and staying up late at night in December. And so it's warmer. It's summertime. You may have the night off, but the best viewing is between 2 and 5 a.m. on the morning of the 13th. Wow. And so you may see predictions.

You'll see, oh, 80 meteors an hour, 100 meteors per hour. that is if you're in Tucson, Arizona or somewhere in the desert. Perfect sky. Perfect skies. Dry weather. So the realistic rate would be about 12 an hour. That's the Dean Regis rate. That's the, sorry to be the buzzkill for that one.

But that's the thing is we hear people say, oh, I went out. I was expecting a hundred an hour, and I saw two. I was like, yeah, it's not my fault. I'm not making the predictions. You never know with these. So what's the best way to watch a media show? Yeah, so the best way, just get out of as far as you can from the city, get out from the city lights, and you don't need binoculars or telescope. Get a comfy chair, kick back, take in as much of the sky as you can.

Because these shoot from different places. They're supposed to irradiate from the constellation Perseus. That's why they call them the Perseids. But they all come from behind you over the side. And it's always the worst when you're talking to somebody and you hear them go, whoa! And you said, what? That's what I miss. And you missed it.

So you just got to be vigilant. That's the big thing. Yeah, you have to be patient. You know, you have a party. Invite a bunch. You get your lawn chairs out, remember? Exactly. And that's what I think is, you know, you don't expect to see the sky falling, but make it

a good excuse to get outside with friends and family on a summer and just kick back and take some time off. And also, you know, you see things you don't expect because every once in a while, I remember last star party I was at, I'm looking up with the sky and I'm saying, it's moving, but it's not an airplane. I know it's not an airplane. What the heck is that? And it's satellites.

Satellites. We've got lots of satellites going over with the space station. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the international space station is so incredibly bright. When it goes over your town, you will notice it. It's just this slowly moving, steady bright light. It doesn't flicker, doesn't twinkle. It takes about five minutes to go from horizon to horizon.

But the bigger ones, the brighter ones are called eridium flares. They are these old communication satellites with reflective body panels, and the light hits them. And when you're in just the right spot, they flare up really fast and then fade away. It's like if you didn't know what was, you'd swear the invasion was on. I did. I saw this 20 years ago or something. I saw this in a dark sky. Whoa, something blew up.

That's right. It looks just like that. It does. It's kind of startling. But you can go to the website I like the best is heavensabove.com or heavens dash above.com. That usually lists where the satellites are going over your head. Am I reflato? This is Science Friday from WNYC.

studios talking with Dean Regis, author of 100 Things to See in the Night Sky. And that reminds me we're talking about what to see. As long as you're out there looking for the media shower, you can search for some great constellations that you can see. As a beginner, and 100 things to see, what constellation should we look for? Well, so if I'm thinking summertime, so we're getting ready for summer, the big constellations to look for are things in what's called the Summer Triangle. And the Summer Triangle is not an official constellation. It's what we call an urban constellation. For us city dwellers,

there's these three bright stars that make this huge triangle. Vega, Denib, and Altair. You see that all summer long. Where would I look for? So you look to the east. They rise in the east in the early summer and then get higher up in the south

as the season goes on. But Vega has this great constellation. Lyra, the harp around it that's supposed to be the harp of Orpheus. And then the Denib is the tail of the swan. Cygnus the Swan, and Altair is the eye of the eagle constellation. Right. And there's some very bright stars out, too, aren't there? Yes. So, yeah, other than the triangle stars, we also have Antares, the big heart of the scorpion

star that's out there, which will confuse you a little bit with Mars, because Mars is the same color. And Antares in Greek is anti-Aries, the anti-Mars, essentially. They're both the same color. But yeah, I can't wait to see that that's the Scorpion's heart star. That's one of my favorites. And you distinguish by your eye. You distinguish a star from a planet, how? What's the biggest? So planets twinkle less, way less than planets than stars. So you'll see stars twinkling and dancing and everything. So Antares will be twinkling red, red, red, red, white, red, red, white, and then bars will be steady, orangish in color. But planets still twinkle a little bit. So you got to watch out for that. It just takes a little practice.

Now, I understand that your home observatory has links to the beginnings of weather forecasting in the U.S.? Yes. Tell us. Well, so the original observatory was near downtown in Cincinnati, and when they built it, it was a small town. We were a small city. But as a city grew, pollution became so bad of smog, like coal pollution, that the poor astronomer up on the hill couldn't even see the stars.

So he had to find something else to do. and he was sitting there watching the smoke clouds blow from west to east, and he gets hooked up to the telegraph, and he gets on the telegraph and says, hey, what's your weather out west? And he became the first weather forecaster. His name is Cleveland Abbey, and he had the telegraph 1860 or whatever.

That's instead of the Doppler 5,000, it's the telegraph. And he started the National Weather Service, all because he couldn't see through the telescope. That's amazing. Yeah. And so there's a lot of firsts, in Cincinnati. Well, let's talk about the observatory. I mean, it's an old observatory. Is it hard to maintain? It's got the little tiny parts and things? Oh, yeah. Yeah, so the old, the original telescope was made in Munich, Bavaria, before Germany was even a country. And so the parts on it

are all original, pretty much all original parts. If something breaks, we have to call up our guys. We got some guys we know that can manufacture parts to spec. But it's amazing. The scope is made out of wood, and it hasn't hardly warped. It's still perfect. Well, it's a great observatory. Dean Regis has Outreach Astronomer at the Cincinnati Observatory, co-host of the PBS show Stargazers, author of 100 Things to See in the Night Sky. Thanks, Dean.

It's always good to have it here. Oh, my pleasure. Keep looking up, guys. BJ Lehman compose our theme music. Our special thank yous to Bill Dean, Don Dan Danko, Kevin Reynolds, Rick Andress, and all the folks at Cincinnati Public Radio have helped make our visit here so comfortable today. Of course, you can always download our podcast if you missed anything, and you can ask your smart speaker, yeah, I won't say it, to play Science Friday whenever you want. So every

day now is a Science Friday, and of course we're active on social community, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Have a great weekend. It is this weekend. It is Astronomy Day, so we'll sign up from Cincinnati. I'm Ira Flato in Cincinnati.