Science Friday - Ohio Train Spill, Mushroom And Memory, Water Infrastructure. Feb 17, 2023, Part 1

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

UFOs? Balloons? Spy Cams? Here’s What’s Going On This week, the saga over UFOs, balloons, and spyware continues. The drama all started with a Chinese surveillance balloon, and then—one by one—governments kept finding others in the U.S. and Canada. Earlier this week, President Biden announced, “We don’t know yet exactly what these three objects were. But nothing right now suggests they are related to China’s spy balloon program or that they were surveillance vehicles from any other country.” So what do we know about these balloons? And why is this such a big deal all of a sudden? Casey Crownhart, climate reporter at the MIT Technology Review, joins Ira to discuss the hullabaloo surrounding these flying objects and other science news of the week. They also talk about the outbreak of Marburg virus in Equatorial Guinea, Tesla agreeing to open some charging stations to other EV drivers, the startups trying to remove methane from the air, what a pencil-shaped robot taught scientists about the “Doomsday Glacier,” and why researchers modeled a new camera after cuttlefish eyes.   How The Western U.S. Could Rebuild Its Water Infrastructure In early January, California was inundated with record-breaking rainfall. The state was battered by back-to-back storms, which caused severe flooding and power outages. But could there be a silver lining in those storm clouds? Given the historic drought conditions plaguing the western U.S., a way to collect or divert rainwater to use when the dry season hits is especially appealing. However, potential solutions are not within easy reach. Ira talks about the limitations and opportunities of storing and diverting rainwater with Dr. Andrew Fisher, hydrogeologist and professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Later, Ira is joined by Dr. Sharon Megdal, director of the University of Arizona’s Resources Research Center, to talk about the drivers of the water crisis and some of the policy solutions being floated to solve the problem.   Ohio Residents Want Answers About Risks Of Train Derailment Hundreds of people packed the high school gymnasium in East Palestine, Ohio, Wednesday evening, trying to get some answers about whether they were safe in their homes after an explosion and the release of numerous toxic chemicals following the train derailment two weeks ago. What started as an open house with tables set up around the floor for the US EPA, the Ohio EPA, the state Division of Wildlife, and the county health department to answer individual questions morphed into a town hall meeting. Residents sat in bleachers and yelled their questions to the officials. Many were angry, largely because Norfolk Southern, the rail operator, did not show up to the meeting. East Palestine Mayor Trent Conaway, surrounded by the media, said the company feared for the safety of its employees because there was so much anger against them. Conaway said people keep blaming him for this horrible incident, and it’s not his fault. Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.   Lion’s Mane Mushrooms Improve Memory, Study Finds For centuries, the lion’s mane mushroom has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for a variety of ailments, including strengthening memory. A recent study from the Queensland Brain Institute confirms what herbalists have long said: There are properties of this mushroom that build brain cells. In mice, these properties promoted neuron growth when diluted in water, resulting in better hippocampal memory. This result is a very good sign that the properties in lion’s mane mushrooms can protect against dementia and Alzheimer’s, the researchers behind the study say. Using the isolated components of the mushroom could be a step forward in the treatment of these devastating brain conditions. Joining Ira to talk about this study is the study’s co-author, Dr. Ramon Martinez-Marmol, research fellow at the Queensland Brain Institute, based in Brisbane, Australia.   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 am Iraf-Fledo. A bit later in the hour, we're going to talk about the water crisis out west and how difficult it is for states to act on it. Plus, the environmental effects of the train derailment in eastern Ohio and how eating mushrooms might give your memory a boost. But first, let's check in on news headlines this week, starting with those mysterious flying objects. Here's a bit of President Biden's speech this week. We don't yet know exactly what these three objects were. But nothing right now suggests they were related to China's spy balloon program or that there were surveillance vehicles from any other country. So what do we know about these balloons?

Here with updates on other science news of the week is Casey Crownhart, climate reporter at the MIT Technology Review based in New York. Welcome back, Casey. Thanks so much for having me back, Ira. It's good to be here. Good to have you. Let's talk about that first object was a spy balloon, but the others don't seem to be, do we have any idea what else they could be? Yeah, so we just heard President Biden say that we don't know a lot about what these are,

or at least intelligence officials aren't really saying much. They're saying that they're probably not surveillance balloons of these three. We know that they were all flying a little bit lower than the first one, and they were all a little bit smaller. But these could be anything from research balloons to, you know, hobbyists can just kind of launch. weather balloons, so they could really be anything. You know, I think what is interesting about this story is that it seems to have caught everybody by surprise. I mean, why are we seeing so many of these all of a sudden? I know. It's pretty wild. So basically, we're seeing these because we're looking for them

for the first time, kind of. All kinds of agencies do sort of early detection to kind of, you know, check out what's going on up in the skies. And after that first Chinese surveillance balloon was detected, apparently a lot of these agencies changed the settings on their radar systems because they were previously kind of filtering out these slow-moving objects. And now they've changed their settings, so they're looking at those again. And so now we're seeing a whole bunch of them. And we don't know yet what kind of surveillance data that first balloon from China was collecting, do we? No, we don't. Search crews recovered the sensors and the electronics from that first balloon this week. So the FBI has all of that stuff now, and they're working to figure out.

more about what that balloon was doing. But they haven't at least released any of that information, so we're still not sure yet. And the White House said they were revising their policy and how these kinds of flying objects are going to be covered. What are they going to do? Yeah. So President Biden said that he's going to put together this sort of interagency group that's going to revise some of these policies because it's kind of unprecedented as far as, you know, finding these objects and deciding whether or not to shoot them down. So they're looking into that. then Biden also said that they might be looking at the policies and kind of standards for what gets launched into the air in the first place. Yeah, yeah. Okay, let's move on to some very serious news at this point. And that's an update from Equatorial Guinea.

The country confirmed its first ever outbreak of Marburg virus disease. Tell us about the virus, what it does, how does it spread? What kind of threat are we talking about? Yeah, totally. So the World Health Organization, like you said, confirmed this week that there's an outbreak of Marbury. virus. There's been at least one death attributed to it so far with, you know, some more folks that were potentially infected. This is a really rare disease. It's caused by a virus that's kind of similar to Ebola. So it causes similar really devastating symptoms. And it spreads through close contact with bodily fluids. Like Ebola, it has a really high fatality rate. So people are, you know, really taking this very seriously. Do we know how the outbreak started? We know that this is a zoonotic disease, meaning that it's harbored.

in animals. It's believed that Margberg was first transmitted to humans from fruit bats. And the outbreak is being contained? The World Health Organization is on it. They're deploying teams to the affected areas and sending supplies. There's no known treatment or vaccine for Marburg right now, although, again, the World Health Organization is looking into that as well. Too soon to panic about this one. Yeah, absolutely. And I just want to like emphasize that this is a disease that is spread only through close contact. It's not spread through the air, like, you know, some of these other like SARS and MERS and COVID. It's a really different thing to deal with. Okay. Let's pivot into a bunch of climate-related news and start with electric vehicle charging news.

Elon Musk said Tesla will make some of its charging stations open for everybody, not just Tesla drivers. What's the plan here? Yeah. So right now to charge at a Tesla charging station, you have to drive a Tesla, and in the U.S. at least, there are all sorts of different charging networks. There are different companies that run their own chargers. The Biden administration really kind of pushed this, and they're, so now Tesla is going to open up about 7,500 of their chargers for all EVs by 2024. That's not very much considering the fact that they're going to double the number of chargers by the end of next year. So while, you're talking about just a fraction of all those chargers. Yeah. So Tesla operates about 18,000 chargers. There are a total.

of about 160,000 in the U.S. They're only opening up about 20% of their network or so. And so there's still a long way to go to reach goals for what people say we need for EV chargers in order to support all the electric vehicles that are going to come onto the roads in the coming years. Yeah, it's going to take an effort by everybody. And there is that money that the Biden administration is putting out there. Yeah. So that's a big thing that spurred this change. The Biden administration has been lobbying for this. You know, they've set a goal for a public charging. network. And so in order to qualify for that federal funding, chargers are going to have to be open to everybody. So that was a big piece of Tesla making this decision. Let's move on to a bunch of

startups that want to remove methane from the air. What could be wrong with that? Yeah. So as you might know, methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. So it traps heat in the atmosphere. It's one of the biggest agents in climate change second only to carbon dioxide. Methane is about 85 times stronger than carbon dioxide is as a greenhouse gas. And so research are really interested in the possibility of removing it to help slow down global warming. But the problem is that some of these startups want to do this by spraying iron particles in the atmosphere, maybe from ships crossing the ocean, in order to kind of react with that methane and pull it out of the atmosphere.

And as you might know, spraying stuff into the atmosphere can be a little bit controversial. You know, this reminds me of an idea that was sort of floated, years ago about releasing iron into the ocean, you know, because they thought that algae blooms would suck up CO2, but that didn't get very far either. Yeah, that's a really good point. And I think that speaks to something that a lot of people are kind of looking at with this sort of idea that we just don't know exactly what we're dealing with when it comes to chemistry in the atmosphere and in the ocean. So these iron particles, maybe they will do exactly what they think that we're going to do. But as my colleague James Temple reported this week, there are a lot of potential

side effects. You know, this could cause other reactions in the atmosphere that we don't want to happen. It could maybe mess with clouds, which could have a big impact on weather patterns. And it could, like you said, cause algae blooms. So there's a lot of kind of questions about whether or not companies should really be doing this. Yeah. Yeah. Tinkering with engineering the climate. Let's go to some other climate news. There's a new study out about the Doomsday Glacier and how a robot named Icefin is helping scientists get a closer look at it. Tell us about that, please. Yeah, I thought this story was so interesting because it's this gigantic chunk of ice about the size of the state of Florida. And some of this ice is over land and some of it is over water. And it's potentially a really

big piece of potential sea level rise in the future. So scientists are really trying to look at this glacier closely and figure out how quickly it's melting, what might happen in the future with it. And so as part of that, they sent this robot. It's kind of like a torpedo shape. It's about nine inches across and about 12 feet long. And they sent it down underneath the glacier to just kind of check out what's going on down there. It had cameras, it had sonar, it had other instruments on board and thrusters to move it around and kind of scope it out. So they usually do these things to see how the glacier is melting.

Did they learn something new about that? Yeah. So it's sort of way more complicated under there than we thought. Why should we not be surprised by that? I know. I know. But models for sea level rise assume that the underside of glaciers are pretty flat. And when they put this robot down there, they saw all kinds of funky stuff. There's, you know, vertical walls, there's crevices, there's all kinds of kind of complicated morphology underneath this glacier. And so the whole picture is a lot more complicated. It's not really

much better or worse than we thought before as far as the prospects for sea level rise. But scientists just kind of understand things a little bit better on how this glacier is behaving, thanks to the robot. And this is an important glacier to keep track of, isn't it? Absolutely. So this glacier alone, if it were to totally melt, could cause two feet of sea level rise over the next few centuries. So that's probably not going to happen anytime soon, but that kind of shows that it's a really big chunk of ice and could have really big effects on sea level in the future. All right. Let's move on to your next story, which we kind of like here on this show, because it features cuttlefish, and we love nothing more than to talk about cephalopods. Now, it turns out it

team of researchers are modeling cameras after cuttlefish eyes? Cuttlefish eyes are good models for these? Yeah. So I think what's really interesting about this story is that different animals have different vision that's designed to do different things. So cuttlefish have really good eyesight. They can see really well in kind of 3D vision. They have very good contrast and their eyes are very sensitive to polarized light. So I don't know if you've ever put on like polarized sunglasses and look down into the water, but you can see really well it kind of minimizes the glare. Cuttlefish eyes do that naturally. So they're a really interesting model for kind of a different way to build a camera. Yeah. And so how does this Cuddlefish inspired camera work? I mean, how is it different from a regular

camera? Yeah. So it's mimicking a lot of the features of Cuddlefish eyes that allow them to see so well in these conditions. So one thing is that Cuddlefish apparently have pupils that are shaped like the letter W. And so they can- Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Pupils? shape. I know. Wow. Shaped like the letter W. Do we know why that's a good shape to have? I know. It's so funky. So this is one of those features that gives them, you know, this kind of good 3D vision and good contrast. I guess, you know, all of these features of their eyes add up to kind of filter out light in a certain way. So they have the W-shaped pupils. They also have the cells in their eyes that detect light. Their photoreceptors are kind of in a line across their eye. And then plus, like I said, they have this kind of like, lens that filters out polarized light. So by kind of mimicking all of these things, by doing a camera that has sort of an opening in the shape of a W, and by doing their aperture in this

line format, these researchers were able to build a camera with those features that could pick out details on a photo better and kind of translate outlines of objects better, even in kind of harsh lighting conditions. This seems like the kind of camera, given what you're talking about, seeing objects that might be used in self-driving cars and things like that. You've got it just right. I think this is one of those applications that could be really interesting for drones, for self-driving cars, for certain kinds of marine vehicles. So it's just kind of new cameras that could help vehicles see in better and new conditions.

Casey, you love all the stuff you keep bringing us. Keep up the good work. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thanks so much for having me back. I had a lot of fun. Yeah, we did too. Casey Crownheart, Climate Reporter at MIT Technology Review. We have to take a quick break, and when we come back, a look at the West's water crisis.

Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Do you remember back a few weeks ago when California was inundated with record-breaking rainfall, the state being battered back to back with storms, causing severe flooding and power outages? You know, I kept thinking, maybe there's a silver lining in these storm clouds. I mean, finding a way to collect or divert the rainwater to use when the dry season hits, especially given the historic drought conditions plaguing the West.

Well, how tough could that be? I wanted to know. So joining me now to talk about the limitations and opportunities of storing and diverting rainwater is my guest. Dr. Andrew Fisher, a hydrogeologist, professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, based in Santa Cruz, California. Dr. Fisher, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. I'm very happy to be here. Let's set some base data here. Start off by giving me a brief California drought up. Have these back-to-back storms in early January replenish the state's water supply in some meaningful way? Not yet. We talk about water in California in the West in terms of water years, and our water year

begins October 1st, and that way the full year encompasses a single rainy season. season, which for us is mostly in the winter and early spring. And we started out with a relatively wet water year this year. And we got those amazing storms, a number of atmospheric rivers. It was so much water in some cases, it caused flooding and landslides and problems. But then we haven't had any rain since then. If we don't get more rain this season, we're going to end up with a sort of average to even slightly dry year in many parts of the state. Well, given just how much rain there was last month, it seemed logical to just collect this rainwater and save it for later. But I guess logic and ease are not on the same page here. That's right. There is quite a bit of effort that

is going into collecting water from these big events. And so some of it was collected and stored. The big challenge is where and when and how quickly that water arrived. It's Quite a challenge when you have large flows in streams and rivers and just sheets of water flowing off the land. It's a challenge to collect that water fast enough and get it to a place where there's space where you can get it stored for later. Well, let's talk about you. You mentioned we could talk about how we could store it. Give us some ABCs on that. Absolutely. Within California and much of the West, there's really three forms of freshwater storage that I'd say are the most important in terms of the volume of water. Number one is our snowpack, and that's the seasonal precipitation that falls as

snow, mostly at higher elevations. And historically, this is a really important part of water supplies in the West. The snow melts in the spring and summer, and it provides really important flows during those times. If we look in California, this is one of the biggest forms of storage that we have, And yet, what we're seeing right now and what we see in the climate model predictions is that by 2100, a lot of that snowpack may be gone. The next really important form of storage is water and reservoirs behind dams. And it's a lot of water. But most of the good dam sites have been built. In addition, when a reservoir behind a dam fills after a big rain event, we're not able to hold all of that water because we need to make room.

in the reservoir for the next storm. So there are very careful rules that dam operators have to apply in order to release water and make space. And if the landscape is already wet and the rivers are already full, then a lot of that released water does just flow out into the ocean, ultimately. And the final primary storage form is groundwater. And as many people have probably heard, there are many aquifers around the state that have been depleted or partly depleted in recent years, especially during the drought, we rely heavily on groundwater. And the one silver lining, I think, we could say when we deplete groundwater is we are making space for more storage. However, it's a challenge to get this excess water to those places fast enough, get it into the

ground quickly enough in the places where there's room and also pay attention to things like water quality, which is really important when we add water to aquifers. And is it as simple as directing the water over the area where you think the aquifer is and letting it percolate down? Is that how you basically just recharge it or is it more complicated than that? There's a number of different methods and they can range from inundating quite large areas and letting the water find its way, even if the most recharge is only occurring through a tiny fraction of the landscape. If you're able to inundate a large enough area, the water will find its way. But that could be problematic in some areas. Not every area has accessible land that could be

used like that. And if there are crops being grown, not all crops are tolerant to, to repeated or extensive inundation. Another approach is to try to select the areas that are especially suitable, the right soils, the right conditions. There's an issue of infrastructure. We've got to get that water from the place where it's running off to the place where it can infiltrate. And then we do have to look at the water quality. Even if the water going in and the water in the aquifer are both pretty good, sometimes when you mix waters of different chemistries, you can end up creating problems. Sometimes there are, say, chemicals on the landscape, maybe pesticides that were used many years ago, maybe fertilizers that are currently being applied. We need to pay attention to that because the

water we apply to the landscape can wash those materials into the ground. Now, when you flood an area to recharge the aquifer, does it stay there in that one spot? I mean, can you paint me a picture of what the aquifer looks like underground and how the water travels through then? Because I'm really geeky. I want to know this is really getting into the weeds, so to speak. Oh, this is such an important question. One of my colleagues, Graham Fogg, who works at UC Davis, I've heard him say multiple times. Most of the aquifer is not an aquifer.

And what he means by that is we think of aquifers in a simple fashion as just being a layer cake of different materials. As an aside, when I was a little kid, I used to imagine groundwater was like frothing cataracts of rivers that flowed through the ground. But it's not. It's mostly water moving through little cracks in spaces between grains of sand or cracks in granite or other rocks. And if you think about what an aquifer looks like, imagine the shape of your hand. It's not necessarily a simple shape like a cylinder or like a shoebox. It might be this weird amoeboid shape that goes a greater distance in one direction, less than another. And then within the aquifer, there are pathways.

There are channels like the veins and capillaries in your fingers that might carry 95% of the water. So the rest of the aquifer might be sort of dead space or space where there's water, but it's moving very slowly. What about wastewater? Can that be filtered enough to return to the aquifer and to be drinkable? It absolutely can. One of the examples here in California that's been doing it for quite a long time is in Orange County in Southern California. What they actually do is most of the water that they recycle, in fact, they don't deliver it directly to customers. They put it into aquifers. And the idea is that the additional time, the additional distance the water travels, the aquifers, the aquifer. aquifer can provide an additional level of filtering and safety. But there are challenges. Recycling is relatively energy intensive, like desalinization, the cost of that water compared to, say,

collection of water from major rivers or water from storm runoff. It's quite a bit higher. And there are technological developments that are improving the ease of water purification. But it's, nevertheless, less it remains today a relatively expensive approach and therefore much more applicable to urban areas because urban water users tend to pay more for their water anyway compared to, say, agricultural or rural water users. Given all the caveats that you've talked about and all the exciting possibilities, how big of a role do these methods we've just discussed to preserve groundwater play in preventing or staving off drought in California? In terms of groundwater, It can play a significant role.

In some basins, groundwater is the primary water supply. However, when we look statewide, I'd say the groundwater part is maybe a 10% to a 30% solution over time. It's not going to be the entire solution. So there's going to need to be a portfolio of solutions. But if we can bring to the table some options for also improving supply, for creating incentives for people to change what they're doing so that they see a reason to engage and collaborate. That's how we're going to solve the problem. Dr. Fisher, you've answered lots of my questions.

I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today. You're welcome. It was a pleasure. Dr. Andrew Fisher, hydrogeologist and professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences University of California, Santa Cruz, based, of course, in Santa Cruz, California. Let's continue discussing the role of rainwater collection in shoring up California's water reserves because despite all that rain, the state's water future is also largely dependent on cooperation with other states. Southern California gets a lot of its water from the Colorado River.

And so California is part of an agreement with six other states and tribal nations to share this precious resource. And just recently, California refused to sign on to a proposal to come to. back on the amount of water they use. Joining me now to help make sense of what this latest squabble means for the West's water future and discuss some of the other policy solutions on the table is my guest, Dr. Sharon Megdal, Director of the University of Arizona's Water Resources Research Center in Tucson. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having you. Nice to have you. What are the ramifications if California doesn't come to an agreement with the six other states, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming on cutting back its water usage.

The situation out here in the Colorado River Basin is really quite complex. And over the years, there has been a history of the states and Mexico and tribal nations working on these issues. But what we're facing right now is extreme shortage of the Colorado River water flows. And we're in unprecedented territories in terms of what's being asked of water users. We're talking about the cutbacks. The seven states haven't come to an agreement. We hope that we can get to an agreement so that the federal government doesn't impose its solutions on the states. But if the states don't come to agreement, it is the responsibility of the federal government to figure this out. Because there's a lot at stake in that agreement, right, with the amount of water usage.

Yes, there's much at stake here. And the fact of the matter is we're talking about agriculture, which uses a large portion of the water across the entire basin. And we're talking, by the way, about water that 40 million people depend upon in some way. It supports agriculture. It supports communities. It supports industry. It supports the environment. And so when there's less water to go around, there's a question of who, experiences the cuts and how much. There are solutions, though, Ira. We can spend a lot of time talking about the problems, but we should talk about the solutions. Yes, let's get into them. Give me an idea of some of the solutions. All right. So I'll give you a quick list, but they're not simple. We can conserve water. We can use less. We can be more efficient in our use. That sometimes can be the low-hanging fruit. We've done it when we can. We can do more.

But that's not enough to get us to where we need to be. We can reuse water. We can take very highly treated wastewater and we use it. We already do for turf irrigation. We can augment our water supplies through, sometimes I call it manufactured water, desalinated water, where we take water that otherwise is not usable and make it usable through technology.

and treatment. We can move water from one place to another. There are places where it's plentiful and available and not being used. They've been talking about moving water, like from, you know, where you have floods to where you have droughts. Is that feasible to do that? The question of moving water depends upon where you're taking it from and where you're moving it to. And one of the options that's getting a lot of attention these days in discussions is what about taking floodwater from the Mississippi, from the Midwest, and moving it to southern Arizona or places in the southwest that are dry. The idea is to come up with something where you don't have losers. A lot of times moving water involves losers. You're taking my water that we need in our area,

moving it to somewhere else. But if you're taking somebody else's floodwater, that could benefit them, the source of the water, and it could benefit those to where you move it. This is a long-term, very complicated option that not that many years ago, people just rolled their eyes and said, don't even talk about it. Now it's getting serious discussion. Arizona and other areas in the West are still growing. We can build in less water use and how we design our buildings, our communities, how much you have lawns and swimming pools. And that, I think, is where there's a lot of opportunity as we grow to just build in less water use. This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios.

These are great ideas, but won't it take a huge investment of infrastructure funding? Well, the question about who pays and how much is a very important question. Sometimes the challenges of the decision making, not the engineering, and it's not even necessarily the money. It's the people's acceptance. People seeing the necessity, the value in undertaking some of these things. but by all means, the question of cost is a very significant one. For example, with desalination, people say, why should we desalinate? It is the most expensive option available.

We should reuse. What I say to that is we have to have a portfolio, a collection of options, look at what we can do, short-term, medium-term, long-term, and people need to know the facts and need to know that, yes, this will cost more, water, but business as usual is not really an option for us. We can't use water like we have if we expect to grow and there's less water available due to climate change, due to aridification. It's sometimes called due to long-term drought. The river is just not producing as much water and we have to get into balance with what it's producing along with all the other supplies

that are available, including Ground War. Well, you mentioned going to take a, it's going to take a combination of solutions. Are you feeling optimistic that we, as you point out, that we are up to the challenge here? I have sometimes been criticized for sounding optimistic. I am optimistic that we can come up with solutions, and I believe we must be optimistic collectively, because if we only focus on the problems and are pessimistic, I don't think we're going to have the mindset that we need to bring all of the people that it will take. And it will take the engineers and the economists and the water managers and the public to figure this all out.

And if we're not optimistic that we can come together and come up with solutions, I don't think we will come up with a pathway forward that the public, can agree upon. This is hard work. And this is all hands-on-deck kind of stuff right now. And we hope they're all listening because we have been talking about this for years now. Dr. Megdell, thank you for taking to have to be with us today. Thank you for having me on the show. Dr. Sharon Megdell, Director of the University of Arizona's Water Resources Research Center based in Tucson, Arizona. We have to take a break. And when we come back, how the train derailment in eastern Ohio could impact the environment. 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. It's been two weeks since a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. That train was carrying hazardous chemicals. People want answers about the effects this will have on this rural community's air and water. Their frustrations were vocalized at a community event on Wednesday. My next guest was there. Julie Grant, managing editor and reporter for the Allegheny Front based in Pittsburgh, PA. Welcome to Science Friday. Before we get into this meeting,

can you give us a little bit of a reminder of the details of this derailment? Sure. On Friday night, about two weeks ago, 50 cars of a Norfolk Southern freight train was on its way from Illinois, Illinois, derailed near a small town in Ohio, East Palestine, as he said, near the Pennsylvania border. The mile and a half long train was carrying at least 10 cars of chemicals, so there was an explosion and fires. That weekend, there was a lot of confusion and stress in that community. Within a day or so, the Red Cross had set up temporary shelter space in the local school, and the company set up an assistance center for the community for people who live nearby to get help paying for hotels. because people wanted to get out of the area immediately.

At least some people do. These chemicals were they particularly hazardous or have health threats to the population? Yeah, I mean, when the crash occurred, we found out first about two toxic chemicals, butyl acrylate, and especially they were talking about vinyl chloride. Exposure to vinyl chloride is known to increase

a risk of developing cancer. Since then, information has come out about other chemicals on board, including ethylhexyl acrylate that can cause headaches, nausea, respiratory problems, and people exposed to it. Also isobutylene, which can make people dizzy and drowsy, and then another chemical that is known to irritate eyes, skin, and the respiratory tract. Wow, wow. And then there was a controlled explosion to try to get rid of the chemicals? Yeah, so this has been pretty controversial in this community. A few days after the derailment,

Norfolk Southern, and regulators said that five of the cars contained that vinyl chloride we mentioned, and that inside at least one of those cars' temperatures were rising. So the Ohio governor, Mike DeWine, said that they were worried this was going to create a catastrophic explosion that would send shrapnel throughout this community and creating grave danger for people there. So he demanded that residents within a one to two mile radius in this evacuation zone get out of there immediately or face arrest. This, the company said, and the regulator said, was an effort to gain control. They cut small holes in the train cars to slowly release the chemicals into a trench and then

they burned it off. The effort was to dissipate this into the air. That led to an explosion, and it sent more toxic fumes throughout this community, which, of course, infuriated many people. But officials said that they still thought. this was the best option given the potential for an unplanned explosion. And these infuriated people got together in a public meeting Wednesday night, almost two weeks after the derailment, you were there? Who else was there?

Look, in the early days, this was only local media. And I will say that at this meeting at the local high school, I mean, there was at least 50, maybe 100 reporters there. And also hundreds of residents poured into the high school gym in East Palis. they were trying to get some answers about whether they're safe in their homes. So officials from U.S. EPA, Ohio EPA, the State Division of Wildlife, the County Health Department were all there. There was a lot of emotion in this room, in large part because the company, Norfolk Southern, the rail operator, did not show up. They did let people know a little bit beforehand that they were not going to be there. The East Palestine Mayor Trent Conway said the company feared for the

safety of its employees because people were so angry. Conway said people keep blaming him for this terrible accident and he kept saying this isn't his fault. Yes, harmful chemicals went in the air. I am truly sorry, but that is the only option we had. If we didn't do that, then they were going to blow up and we were going to throw shrapnel all across this town. People keep forgetting, yeah, I'm a local politician. I live in this town. I don't live somewhere else. I live in East Palestine. I live two walks from the train tracks. And the people are not feeling safe. Would it be safe to say?

I would say a lot of people are not. They have a lot of concerns, mostly how this is going to impact their health. I talked with one mother, Rebecca Diltz. She had a young child with her. She says they live 1.8 miles from the site. They returned home the evening after that evacuation order was lifted. And the next morning, her daughter woke up with what she called chemical pink eye. Both of her eyes were swollen, and then they were bloodshot, and they were swollen all the way down to past her cheeks.

And then whenever I took her to the doctor and explained the situation, she actually had to call another pediatric eye doctor because she wasn't sure how to treat it. Another parent, Jamie Urban, has not returned to her home, which is within the one-mile evacuation zone. But me and my kids have been living out of a cabin. I'm in the one-mile radius, and I refuse to bring them back because I know there's something wrong. She says her five-year-old has developed an eczema-type rash that she blames on the contamination. She doesn't trust the air test results because some of that testing has been done by a Norfolk Southern contractor. And during that meeting, a lot of people had these kinds of concerns. Regulators and Norfolk Southern have been telling the community all this time that the air is safe. But there's a strong odor.

I mean, I was there and I was feeling like a burning on my tongue and through my nasal passages. There was a young boy spoke up. He asked everyone in the room if it was safe to play outside when there's such a strong smell in the air. And people who were cheering. There were also questions about testing of drinking water wells and if they could wash their dishes, their clothes and themselves in this water. And what were the answers? Did they get answers or did they feel like they're still being ignored? Well, the government did provide some answers, whether or not people believe those answers is another question. But when it comes to air quality, U.S. EPA has maintained throughout this that their testing has shown that the air is safe. That's been the message since two days after that planned chemical release when they lifted the evacuation order and allowed people to return home. James Justice of the EPA responded to questions like the one from that young boy, and he blamed the smell that lingers on the chemical butyl. We mentioned, he said that chemical can linger in the air for a long time without causing any health

effects. And I should mention, he also blamed that same chemical earlier in the evening for the death of 3,500 fish in nearby waterways. Now, Norfolk Southern, as you've told us, did not attend the meeting. Have they been in communication with the residents? What are they saying about this whole situation? Well, the morning after that meeting, company president Alan Shaw wrote a letter to the community of East Palestine, promising that the company will not walk away from this situation. The company says on its website that it has spent more than a million dollars to help more than 70 families with evacuation costs. It says it's completed in-home air tests in 340 homes in-conjunction with U.S. EPA with more than 100 more sites scheduled. In-home air monitoring has not showed any

detections, it says, related to the incident and does not indicate a health risk. And it says it's also sampled East Palestine's drinking water and water wells and expects results next week. Yeah. Of course, we can expect legal actions to follow. Oh, yeah. There are already legal actions that have been filed. There were attorneys at that meeting last night. You could see them with their groups of clients. They're representing citizens and businesses. They're looking for things like independent air and water monitoring. they're looking for long-term medical screenings and health care costs and compensation for losses. One suit alleges that Norfolk Southern's efforts to clean up and mitigate the calamity actually

worsened the situation. Wow. So where do we go from here? What can we expect to happen now, Julie? Yeah. Well, both the U.S. EPA and the Ohio EPA say they are going to remain on the scene to monitor air and water to ensure the safety of residents. The company has said it intends to monitor groundwater. Ohio's governor has asked the CDC to send medical experts to evaluate health problems.

Julie, great work. Thank you for taking time to fill us in. Well, you're welcome. Thank you for having me. Julie Grant, managing editor and reporter for the Allegheny Front based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. If you're anything like me, you love a good mushroom, sauteed and a little butter on top of pasta or pizza. Mm-hmm. You know, for centuries, a special time.

kind of mushroom has been used in Chinese medicine for improving memory, the lion's main mushroom. And now a study has confirmed what herbalists have long said there are properties in the lion's main mushroom that build brain cells. Could the mushroom help protect against dementia and Alzheimer's? Joining me is the co-author of the study published in the Journal of Neurochemistry. Dr. Ramon Martinez Marmal, research fellow at the Queensland Brain Institute based in Brisbane, Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you very much, Sarah. Nice to have you.

So you isolated brain stimulating compounds. What exactly do these compounds do? First of all, we just put them on top of neurons. I shall let neurons from the brain of mice. And they start reacting so fast. And they start growing much more than in normal conditions. And that was the first astonishing result that we got contacted by a company from Korea. and they had several compounds purified from this beautiful lion-main smartroom.

I had to Google that the first time. It's like, okay, let me see. I mean, I love mushroom, but they haven't heard about that before. Yeah. And they sent them, and we set up some basic experiments to check the basic neurotrophic activity. And the results from the day zero were amazing. So you first tested it out in a petri dish, the compounds. Yes.

And when you found the ones that you thought were really working, you then fed them to the mice. Yeah, that's right. And what happened? Well, the way it's done is we set up some experiments on behavioral experiment, try to check their memory, try to check their activity, if they were more active, less active, if they could remember a little bit more. So the way those experiments work is you put an animal in the middle of a box with two objects.

The animal just starts moving around and then you change one of the other. object, put the animal with a different one, and the animal, they have to show more attraction for the new one. And this is a kind of classic behavioral test for recognition and remembering what is old and what is new. And what happened is that when we provide this compound, the animals show much more interest in the new objects, and that's a clear proof of increasing in memory. Were you able to tell what was going on in the brains of these mice? Well, based on the inveter results, we found out that we were enhancing what we call neurotrophic activity.

So neurotrophins, they are molecules that our brain cells release. And this happens usually during growth. When our brain is formed, there's a lot of release of this neurotrophine, and that's what make neurons grow and extend and reach their final targets. They have to grow like very long distance. and they do that through signaling molecules and through what we call neurotrophins that enhance that growth. So we found out with in vitro experiments that these compounds were working through a kind of neurotrophic-like activity. So how would you describe that in layman's terms?

So it's kind of feeding the neurons. So the neurons they have to grow, they have to feed themselves. And they secrete substances that. they are going to make them grow faster. Without those, the neurons don't grow. The brain do not develop. There's lots of neurodevelopmental disorders associated with the lack of these neurotrophins. So it's something that the neurons they produce kind of are to feed themselves and to make them grow more.

So the cool thing of the story is that somehow the compound that we isolate from mushrooms could mimic that activity. I'm I Refleito and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So it mimics the activity of feeding the neurons and the neurons grow. Yes, this growing of neurons is something that happens naturally when we are growing, but when we reach my age, when we get older, that activity start to stop. So the challenge of neuroscience has been to try to promote this growing activity even in those periods where this is stopped.

Like, for example, thinking this may be useful for dementia, this may be useful after stroke, for example, to promote this growth of new neurons. That's why when we found this activity, we start thinking ahead, like, okay, this is going to be good for in the future, maybe for Alzheimer, maybe for stroke, maybe for other diseases. When could we see this tested out in people? It sounds so promising here.

Yeah, it's already happening in Korea. we were collaborating with two universities in South Korea, and they already have started having clinical trials in healthy people first to check for this neotrophic activity. I mean, this has been talked about in herbal medicine, right, and folklore and people have been using this for years, eating these mushrooms, believing it improves memory. You think you have justified those beliefs now? Well, based on our data, yes. if we purify that compound from the same mushrooms

and it has some positive effects on growing neurons and enhancing memory, yes, but I think this is always the same. So there are lots of belief in traditional medicine, not from China, but from many other countries. And it's simply there's not enough research behind to try to purify those molecules and then know what's going on. Do you know in humans how many mushrooms people could be eating? Because I know when this gets out and we talk about this,

There's going to be a run on this mushroom. The prices are going to skyrocket, right? Yeah, so we don't know. So from the mushroom to the purified compound, I don't know how many of these compound can come from one mushroom. If you eat one mushroom, I don't know how much of this compound is going to reach your brain, which was the second cool thing. So this is a lipophilic molecule, well, diluted in lipids, all our cells,

the membrane of our cells, what separates our cells in the whole body from the outside, is a lipid bilayer. And one of the cells that have more membranes are the neurons. The amount of membrane that they have is huge and it's amazing. Plus, the brain is covered by a membrane called the blood-brain barrier that prevents and isolate the brain from the exterior. the exterior from the inside of our body. It's very hard from the blood to reach anything inside of the brain. And that's the challenging thing for pharmacies to make molecules that can

effectively pass through this blood-brain barrier and reach the inside of the neurons. And the cool thing is that that molecule is liposolibate. So that could go through this barrier and reach the inside of the brain very fast. And that was the second cool. thing that why we were so interested in this specific molecule. Well, we will keep in touch. Is that okay to find out how this is progressing? Yeah, of course. Definitely. Thank you very much for taking time to be with us today. Thank you very much for calling.

Dr. Ramon Martinez Marmal, research fellow at the Queensland Brain Institute based in Brisbane, Australia. And that's about all the time we have for this hour. Here's Ariel Zitch with some of the folks who helped make this show happen. Thanks, Ira. as our radio director. Sandy Roberts is our education program manager. Danielle Dana is our executive director, and I'm Director of Audience, Ariel Zich. Thanks for listening. Thank you, Ariel. B.J. Liederman compose our theme music. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.