Science Friday - Parch Marks, Wildfires, The Beatles. August 10, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: August 10, 2018

The Mendocino Complex fire in northern California has spread to more than 300,000 acres—a swath of land bigger than New York City. The blaze is the state’s largest wildfire in recorded history, edging out last year's record-setting Thomas Fire, which devastated communities north of Los Angeles. While climate change is certainly to blame in fanning the flames of wildfires (by boosting temperatures, parching landscapes, and causing more erratic rainfall) there's another factor that's making today's fires increasingly dangerous: a nearly 1,400 percent increase in the number of people building homes in harm's way since the 1940s. Stephen Strader of Villanova University, Jon Keeley of the U.S. Geological Survey, and Erin Questad of Cal Poly Pomona join Ira to talk about people in the way of fire—and how we can nurse those ecosystems back to health. If you had a number one hit song, you would probably remember writing it. John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote over 200 songs together over 50 years ago. So it’s no surprise that memories have gotten a little fuzzy when it comes to who wrote which Beatles song. Mark Glickman, senior lecturer in statistics at Harvard University and Beatles super-fan, developed an algorithm to determine the authorship of “In My Life” and several other contested Beatles songs. He (and his guitar) join Ira to discuss his findings. Plus: It’s been hot in the United Kingdom this summer. But as lawns parch and grasses turn brown, the landscape is also revealing the buried remains of valuable archaeological finds. Aerial archaeologist Robert Bewley, at Oxford University, describes how “parch marks” can reveal hidden treasures. And Vox staff writer Umair Irfan joins Ira to discuss what the researchers discovered about the benefits—and downsides—of a future geoengineered climate, and other science headlines in this week’s News Round-up.   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. A bit later in the hour, we're going to get an update on those wildfires burning out west and talk about how a population boom could be fueling the flames. But first, in this era of radical climate change, some scientists are thinking radically about how to cool the planet. I'm talking about geoengineering, intentionally manipulating the Earth's atmosphere. It is a controversial idea, and as I say, with radical thinking, like using, Volcanoes. Here to tell us that story, as well as other short subjects in science, is Omer Ifan, a staff writer for Vox covering climate and energy. Omer, welcome to Science Friday. Nice to have you back. Thank you for having me. Let's talk about this geoengineering controversy. Why? Well, with geoengineering, there is a practical concern and there's a moral concern.

The practical one is basically you're messing with the planet's climate. This is something that affect seven and a half billion people. Think about the controversy you may have in your office when it comes to setting the temperature there. Finding the equilibrium for the whole world is going to be a lot harder. And so how did the authors get around? Tell us what the idea is. Well, the idea was that rather than deliberately manipulating the climate, they looked at experiments that were done for us in nature, and they realized that volcanoes seem like a very good proxy for what we could potentially do with the geoengineering. So a volcanic eruption, that sends millions of tons of soot of ash and in particular sulfur compounds into the atmosphere.

So they looked at two volcanic eruptions in particular. This was El Chichon in Mexico in 1982 and the Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in 1991. After both of these eruptions, the planet's temperature as a whole declined by about a fraction of a degree centigrade. And they wanted to look at what happened to crops and agriculture in the wake of these eruptions to get a sense of what potential geoengineering would do in the future. And did it affect the crops? Yeah, they found that there were some crop declines due to lost sunlight, but there were also some rebounds due to lower temperatures.

And they figure that looking forward into the future under a climate change scenario, the gains that we would get from lower temperatures that would help improve crops would be offset from the losses that we would get by reflecting more sunlight. In that sense, it would be sort of a wash when you're looking at temperature and sunlight. Yeah, so geoengineering is still a tricky subject. Yeah, basically, yeah. It shows that there's some real tradeoffs when we're considering the impacts. Speaking of particles in the air, fires are still raging in California.

We're going to talk more about that a little bit later, but you have a story about some weird weather they are bringing to the area. Yeah, that's right. These fires in California are so massive that they can induce their own weather systems around them. And scientists reported just earlier this month that they saw, pyrochumulus clouds. These are clouds that are formed by the upward draft from the fires that emit soot and ash into the air and then also cause moisture to condense. They're typically associated with volcanic eruptions, but seeing fires do this is kind of unusual. And these

pyrocumulus clouds, they can behave like normal clouds in terms of producing rainfall and thunder and lightning. Another thing that they saw was a fire whirl. This is, this was in the car fire near Redding, California. and this was a massive spinning column of fire, smoke, and wind. Meteorologists don't like the term fire tornado, but that's kind of the effect that we're looking at here. It generated winds of about 143 miles per hour, and meteorologists say that that might be the strongest spinning wind event in California's history. Wow. Maybe a giant fire dust devil might be better.

Yeah, dust devil is a good analogy, but we're talking about something that can uproot trees and spit throw cars. Wow. Up next you have a story about a gooey corn. I saw a picture of this on the internet. It really does look like corn covered in mucus. What's going on here? Researchers are actually pretty excited about this. What you're looking at is a picture of aerial roots of a maize or corn plant that was cultivated in the Sierra Mica region of Huahaka, Mexico. And this is the ancestral homeland of corn. This is where some of the most pristine and diverse strains of corn are. And researchers realized that this plant was great. growing in very poor soil and at high altitudes, and yet it was still producing food, and people were, and they were really curious as to why this was happening. And so what is it, is it extracting nitrogen out of the air? What's causing the mucus on it? Well, the plant itself produces mucus, and it has sugar in it, and that allows it to cultivate

bacteria, and that bacteria actually pulls nitrogen out of the air, so that it's a symbiotic relationship. Essentially, it's fertilizing itself rather than trying to draw nutrients from the soil. And this creates a really interesting possibility for crops around the world that currently depend on fertilizers. We spend upward of 5 million tons of fertilizer each year on corn crops, and corn is the largest grown crop here in the United States. Wow, that seems terrific that it can take the nitrogen and fertilize itself out of the air. Why haven't we known about this before, this kind of corn? Well, researchers observed this effect for decades.

They saw this corn, but they couldn't quite figure out what was the mechanism at work here. And only recently have we developed the modern genome sequencing tools and also the microbiome analysis tools to actually analyze the bacteria that were growing on this corn crop to see what they were actually doing. And to verify that, in fact, they were pulling nitrogen out of the air and turning it into a form that could be usable for the plant itself. Is it possible to then, you know, grow this on a large scale for, you know, agricultural purposes, like we grow corn normally? That's the idea. This is a maze crop, so technically probably could be cross-bred with existing varieties of corn. And as we mentioned, yeah, corn already uses a huge amount of fertilizer. And if we could get it to produce some of its own, we could offset a huge amount of the environmental consequences associated with agriculture and fertilizer application, things like runoff that causes algae blooms and then dead zones and coastal waters.

Those are things you can actually avoid by developing a crop that can feed itself. Finally, you know, this is going to be a big weekend for space levers. We've got the Parker Solar Probe scheduled to launch. And also there's the Perseeds Meteor shower, right? That's right. That's one of the largest meteor showers of the year. It's a spectacular space show. It's caused by the wake of the Swift Tuddle Comet.

And it's a lot of small pea-sized particles that are going to be passing through the atmosphere. And already tonight and over the weekend, you'll be able to see it. But Sunday night is when it peaks, and you'll be able to see upward of 60 meteors per hour. And this weekend, we also have a new moon, so the sky's going to be extra dark. So it's definitely worth getting out there if you can. And unfortunately, it's going to be extra cloudy where I live. I have missed all the planets. I'm going to miss the meteor shower.

You got to get out there so you can. Yeah, road trip. You've got to get weirds dark, right? Get your eyes accumulated to see this. That's right. Yeah. And this is great media shower. This weekend is peaking this weekend, right?

Yes, Sunday night. Sunday night. I hope you all can get out there. I'll have to watch it online. Thank you, Omer. You bet. Umerifan is a reporter for covering climate energy for Vox. Now it's time to play, good thing, bad thing.

Because every story has a flip side. It's been a hot summer all over a northern hemisphere, especially tough on countries not used to sweltering in this weather like the U.K. The summer in the United Kingdom has been the driest on record, the gardens and lawns, though they've all dried up. What could possibly be good? all of that? Well, my next guest, an aerial archaeologist, says it's been a good summer for finding things buried deep beneath the ground. Dr. Robert Bully is Director of Endangered Archaeology

in the Middle East and Northern Africa at the University of Oxford in Oxford. Welcome to Science Friday. Hello, hi. So this weather is actually good news for archaeologists. Well, it's good news for aerial archaeologists in that we can get into aeroplanes, use drones, and take photographs of sites that we would otherwise not be able to see. We might get a hint of them from the ground, but you've got to get into the air to get the pattern of them and see these sites that, because of the exceptional weather, are showing up in grass and the various crops in a way that really only happens once every 10 or 20 years, but this has been an exceptionally dry year, so it's fantastic news for us. So you mean as the ground dries out the other stuff you can see coming up

and sort of visually through the ground? Yes. Yes. I mean, so particularly for parched marks, when the grass above a wall, for example, it's obviously looking for water and nutrients, but it's because it's above a wall, it can't find them. So it just sort of dies above that wall and therefore you get it as a yellow mark and the surrounding area is green. And then in a wheat crop or a barley crop, you get the crops above a ditch where there's more nutrients and more water stay greener for longer. So you get a dark mark with a yellow area around it. And we can see sites that date from 2,000 or 3,000 BC or they might even just relate to the Second World War. So it's fantastic because you get archaeology from the 20th century right back to 5,000 BC. So it's

great. So you're all up there flying around. Now you're documenting these things as well as you can. Well, at the moment, because it's now August, most of the crops are off. So that's what the people in England, Wales, Scotland have been doing and undertaking the aerial reconnaissance. I tend to now, as you said, in the introduction, work in the Middle East and North Africa. So it's slightly different for me, but I used to do this all the time in England. And we used to pray for summers like this and hope that we would get a hot, dry summer. And the last one, everybody casts their mind back to is 1976.

And we've had other dry summers in between, but nothing on the scale of this. It's been hotter and drier for longer than we can possibly remember. Yeah, I've been following that. Have folks found anything so far? What kinds of things are popping up? It's a whole range of things from, in Ireland, they've found another Henge monument in the prehistoric Henge monument and passage grave in the Boyne Valley. There have been numerous prehistoric enclosures, circular enclosures, square,

enclosures found in Wales and all throughout England and Scotland. And the problem is there's so many photographs being taken. You have to seize the moment and take the photographs. It then takes a long time to actually begin to assess it. And I remember in 1989 when we had a really dry summer, it took as many months, if not, into the following year, before we'd been able to look at all, just even look at all the photographs and see what it is that had been discovered.

So it's going to take some time before the real impact is known, but it is literally hundreds, if not thousands, of new sites. And information about sites that we know added information about that because, you know, Roman forts where you can see the internal arrangements that we couldn't before or roads running into them and associated sites around them. So it's building up the picture of the landscape that makes it really interesting. Well, that's good to see there is a little bit of a silver lining to this drought in heat. Absolutely, yeah.

Okay. Thank you, Dr. Beuling. Okay, thanks very much. You're welcome. Stay cool. Dr. Robert Buehley, Director of Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and Northern Africa, University of Oxford, is staying up late for us today. We're going to take a break, and after the break, climate change is fanning the flames of wildfire with higher temperatures and more erratic rains out west. But there might even be more important factor to blame for the recent destruction. What is that factor? It's ourselves.

We'll talk about the development and population rise. In the face of ever-worsening fires, why are we building in places where the fires are happening? We'll talk about it after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. 2017 was the year of California's most destructive fire on record. That was the Tubbs fire in wine country, killed two dozen people, incinerated more than 5,000 homes and buildings. 2017 was also the year of California's largest fire by area. That was the Thomas fire in the...

Ventura, which tore through hundreds of thousands of acres of coastal hills and communities leaving 1,000 buildings burned to dead. Well, that was last year. This week, a fast-growing fire in Mendocino became the state's largest ever wildfire in recorded history, only half contained. Other fires have closed Yosemite Valley indefinitely, wiped a Southern California community off the map, and the entire Western U.S. is choking on. on hazardous, hazy air as lands smoke and smolder in every western state. We've all heard that climate change causes higher temperatures, more erratic rains. Factors like that worsen the wildfires. But my next guest says there's another factor at play here too, and that is us.

Stephen Strater is the author of a study on human development and wildfire risk out earlier this year in the journal Natural Hazards and an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and at the Villanova University in Pennsylvania. He joins us by Skype. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me. Now, your study shows that more and more people are at risk for wildfires than ever before, and that there's been a huge boom in building these vulnerable areas,

and they're building in the areas. Tell us about it. Yeah, so when we look at disasters themselves, I like to think about a wildfire that occurred in the middle of no aware 100 years ago. We don't really hear about it. We don't care about it. But throughout time, really since the 1920s, 30s and 40s, we've started expanding our cities. Development has sprawled outward from the urban cores. And we're now living in regions that have always been prone to wildfires, but we're interacting with wildfire landscapes much more throughout time.

So that's part of the reason for some of these increases in wildfire disasters. So you're saying that even when an average fire burns now, it's going to have more serious consequences, because more people are there compared to, let's say, 50, 60 years ago? Yeah, it's a very simple concept. And the way I like to think about disasters, specifically wildfires, is that it's two sides to a coin. On one side, we have the effects of climate change. We have increasing temperatures. We have heat that is in drought that are lasting longer and longer, specifically in the western half of the weather. the U.S. That influences the environment that can breed wildfires. At the other side of the coin,

on the other side, the flip side of the two-headed monster is as us. We tend to start the majority of fires as society, and we're now putting ourselves into these regions more and more that are susceptible to fires. So both of these dynamic processes are ongoing at the same time, leading to more frequent disasters. You know, this sounds very much like climate change in hurricanes, you know, not more of them, more destructive storms that we get, and then you have more people building on the shorelines or living in floodplains? Yes, that's 100% correct. And it goes beyond wildfires in general. It goes to a number of disasters and hazards like tornadoes, tropical storms, sea level rise, flooding. Unfortunately, humans, we want to live

in beautiful landscapes where we have greenery and we have a lot of land. We want to live where we can see the sunset or the sun rise over the ocean. Unfortunately, these regions are also areas where we experience hazards. So we've seen a trend really in the last hundred years of people putting themselves in very vulnerable situations when a hazard should strike. I'd like to bring on another guest into the conversation. John Keely is a research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey. at Sequoia National Park, and an adjunct professor at UCLA.

He joins us from WWNO in New Orleans. Welcome to Science Friday. Hello, Ira. Nice to be here. Thank you. You know, we got the impression from seeing these huge fires in the media that the wildfires are increasing. They're more frequent than ever, but you've investigated and found that that is not the case. Well, I think Dr. Strader made an excellent point, and that is, historically, we have had big fire events.

There are really two things we can point to that have changed, and one of them he points to, and that is simply they're more destructive. More people are affected by these fires. For example, in Southern California, we had a 300,000-acre fire in 1889, and nobody died. There were no homes destroyed. What's changed over that period of time is we have more people on the landscape that are at risk. The other thing, though, that has changed is we are actually getting more of these big ones. fires. Historically, in the 20th century, we would get maybe a hundred thousand acre fire once a decade. Now we're seeing just in the last year and a half, we've seen four really major fire

events. So we're getting more of them, and there's no question that that's the case. The real question is how much of this is due to global warming, due to climate change? And at this point, I would say we know that it's playing a role. We can't necessarily parse out how much to attribute to that because there are other factors. For example, these big fires we're seeing right now in Mendocino County and the one up in Shasta. These have occurred during an extreme heat wave with very high temperatures and extreme winds. We've had heat waves many, many times in the past. We get them somewhere in the West probably every year, but we don't get big fire events.

And so what is the difference is somebody ignites a fire either intentionally or accidentally during one of these heat waves. And that relates back to Dr. Strader's point, and that is you put more people on the landscape, and there's a greater chance that somebody is going to ignite a fire during one of these extreme events. That leads me to a question. We talked about similar disasters and other parts of the country. We're building where water or storms are the great hazard. A tweet from Headley comes in, and it dovetails with what I was going to ask, and he says, is it time to revisit building codes and also address what sort of structures

are allowed to be built in fire-prone regions? And I'm also going to ask about the insurance industry. The insurance industry has been controlling where you, you can build things where there's water damage. Will we start wondering, you know, is there a hazard? You have to pay extra insurance or you might be prevented from building where there might be fire damage from building inside forest? Well, I would say that we certainly have been looking at building codes, and there have

been improvements over the last couple decades. There are limits to the level of improvements simply because it means higher cost for homes and already in places like California, people are stretched very thin in terms of being able to afford housing. So it's something that I know politicians have to look at very closely before they make a decision to reduce the fire hazard because they know it's going to increase the costs of homes. So there's no question that improving building ordinances could be a factor that would help reduce losses. But the other factor is simply that we have more and more people on the landscape,

and they have to be put somewhere. And it's part of the reason these fires are getting so disastrous. For example, Santa Rosa suffered, like you mentioned, the Tubbs fire, disastrous losses of human life and property in October of last year. It burned in exactly the same area as a 1964, or Hanley fire, but that fire didn't kill anybody, and there was, I think, maybe 80 homes destroyed. But between 64 and 2017, there's been a five-fold increase in population. And that's a big part of the problem.

Santa Rosa has grown at probably two and a half times the average rate for the state. And the city of Santa Rosa has to find places for these people. And so that's, you know, that's one of those problems that as long as populations are growing, We're going to see, you know, that these decisions are harder and harder to make. And in the next 30 years, we're expecting California will increase by 50 percent. That means we got real problems to solve. 844724-8255 is our number if you'd like to join us, or you can tweet us at Cy Fry. Stephen, is there any talk of halting development in these wildfire-prone areas?

Or do you think that's a, as we've been talking about, it's a political, an economic non-starter. Who's going to say you can't build? Yeah, and I agree with 100% with what John is saying, is that it's part of the difficulty with this issue with wildfire disasters and all disasters, for that matter, is they have different incentives or there's different facets and dynamic processes going on.

We have the effects of climate change. But what we're seeing more and more is, or not seeing enough of, this incentive to not build in locations that are prone to disasters. We've done some of this or we've tried to do some of this with the National Flood Insurance Program, and we've tried to limit the growth in flood planes to say, hey, these homes, if you build here, you're risk at flooding. And maybe we should do that with additional hazards. Unfortunately, the incentives just quite aren't there yet. For instance, recently this has been proposed, one of the largest developments,

planned developments in California history in northern LA County, where over 19,000 homes are planned to be developed. Issues of wildfire risk have been brought up with this region, and it is in a region of high wildfire risk. Yet when there's money to be made, what we do is we see that driving the risk. We see that driving people almost gambling to a sense of saying, well, we can develop here because if there is a disaster, federal tax dollars will subsidize that disaster. So there's not really an incentive at each individual level that stops us from building in these regions.

And that's what makes it difficult is because we have to work across disciplines and as part of a team with researchers, public, etc, to say, hey, maybe we shouldn't be here. And then to John's point, where do we put people at that stage? Cities only have so much land. It's a very difficult question, and one that I think takes quite a bit of thought. effort. Let me see if I get a call in here. Let's go to Sean in Newburgh, North Carolina. Hi, Sean. Hi, how are you? Hey there. Go ahead. Yeah, I try to catch a show whenever I can. Usually I'm on the road, and I love the science. But hey, I just wanted to say that I was a wildland firefighter back in 2009 out of Tucson, Arizona, and had fought fires in California. And I got to say,

California had the thickest undergrowth I have ever seen in my short time of firefighting. I fought fires in Southern Arizona, New Mexico, California, and Oregon, and Washington. And you literally couldn't see 12 inches in front of your face for the undergrowth. And there's really, I think that plays a huge factor in the fires. that they're having now is just the amount of undergrowth they have out there. I saw trees that are growing horizontally to the ground looking for sunlight. Let me get a comment. John?

Sure. The caller brings up a very good point, and the point is that you can't attribute these disasters to just a single factor. They're multifactorial, and certainly the success of fire suppression on many landscapes has allowed anomalously high levels of fuel to accumulate, and that is a factor in a lot of places. For example, if you look at these recent fires Mendocino County, the ranch fire, which was the biggest one of those two fires that merged together, that area, it looked to me when looking at fire maps,

maybe half of that landscape had not burned in 100 years, and that's way outside the natural range. for those systems. But on the other hand, it should be recognized that about half of that landscape had burned quite recently. And even though it was maybe 20 to 30 years of age, which is quite reasonable, it's still burned. And so we have to realize that, sure, we do need to deal with fuels, but sometimes that's not going to be enough. And you have an extreme heat wave like we've had the last couple weeks. And then you couple it with what's probably the biggest driver of these big fire events.

That is we had an incredible drought between 2012 and 2015 in the northern part of the state. In Southern California, that 2012 drought has not ended. And it's caused lots of dieback. And so the car fire produced a huge amount of dead, or that area had a huge amount of dead trees, which likely contributed to that. So there's a lot of things going on out there. Ira Plato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I want to thank Stephen Strader, a since professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at Villanova University.

Thanks for joining us today. I'm going to have to see. You're welcome. Still with us is John Keely of the USGS. And, you know, after firefighters put out the flames, leaving a charred landscape behind, will those Barron Hills get a chance to grow back before the next fire? I want to bring on another guest who helps nurse burned ecosystems back to health. Aaron Questad is a restoration and restoration ecologist and associate professor of biology

at Cal Poly Pomona. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me on the show. You're welcome. So what is the prognosis for these areas once the fire has gone through there? So most of our ecosystems in California are adapted to fire, and they do have the ability to respond fairly quickly under the right conditions. So when the fire comes through, it looks like everything has been completely destroyed,

especially when we have these really high-intensity fires. But there are actually all of these things underground that are just waiting to come back up. So there's a lot of seeds that germinate after fire, and a lot of our native shrubs and trees have the ability to resprout from their roots underground. And so when the conditions are right, our ecosystems can come back, themselves. But you've already mentioned on the segment that climate change is a is a is creating different conditions now. And another issue that affects the recovery of these ecosystems are invasive species that have brought into been brought into California from other parts of the world.

And once these species get a hold in some of these places after fire, they prevent the native species from coming back indefinitely. And I know you have a lot of, a lab where you study the tricks to get plants to regenerate things like smoking the seeds? Yeah, so a lot of that work has been done by Dr. Keely and others in California to learn about how different native species in California respond to fire. And they have all these really interesting adaptations. And so we use that in restoration to give them a little bit of a head start. And so if we want to grow some plants for restoration, we first have to get the seeds to germinate by heating them or smoking them. Or in some cases, they're really stubborn and we have to actually light them on fire.

Wow. Right. So. I want to ask the follow up, but we don't have to have to go to a break. And I'll come back and say, can you really light a seed on fire and get it to grow again? We'll answer that question after the break. Stay with us. We'll be right back talking about the wildfires, fires.

out there out west with Erin Quested and John Keely. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking about how hotter or more devastating wildfires and climate change might reinvent the landscapes of the West and how scientists can help vulnerable native species get a head start with my guest. Erin Kestad is an associate professor of biology at Cal Poly Pomona. John Keely researched scientists with the USGS at Sequoia. National Park. Our number 844-724-8255, and when I went to the break, Erin was telling us that in her lab they set seeds of fire. Is that right? Only one absolutely necessary, and in a very controlled way. So, but that is the key to the getting to seed, the sprout and growing again?

Yes, some of the species are very difficult to germinate when they're not in the natural conditions. And for a few of them, that is the most effective strategy, to plant them in a planter and set the top of it, a very small fire on the top. John Keely, you know, I hear stories here in the east about, like, maple trees, maple syrup trees moving north because they really need the colder climate and now the climate changes here. Or is that happening out there?

Are extreme drought and wildfires changing the landscape permanently? are some species moving north? Well, there's no question that that is a big concern. In fact, this week I was at the Ecological Society meetings here in New Orleans, and there was a lot of discussion of models that people have been developing, predicting pretty radical shifts in range expansions due to global warming. So it is something that we're very concerned about, but at this stage, seeing evidence of it,

There's really limited evidence of it, but there's plenty of reason to expect it based on the close association between temperature and species distributions and the predictions for the future suggest things are going to move. And one of the big restoration questions today to many managers is how much should we assist this process? And it's a process known as assisted migration. If we expect species to move north or to be favored for their north, should we actually help them by moving seed sources to areas outside the current range? And that's a matter of a lot of controversy right now. Well, let me follow up a bit on that. I hate to ask this, Aaron, but in Mendocino Complex,

the fire is over 300,000 acres. You talk about the seed that you're growing and getting to sprout. How do you replant seedlings on 300,000 acres? Yeah, well, there is usually not enough funding to do all 300,000 at the same time. And so what we research in my lab is how we can allocate our resources for restoration strategically. So we use a lot of mapping and terrain modeling, which helps resource managers make decisions about where the best places are on the landscape to implement restoration. So we can start with the highest priority places first and then work our way into larger and larger areas. I should add to that if I could,

Ira. There is certainly a need for restoration under many circumstances where there's been human disturbance. But even an area 300,000 acres like the Mendocino Complex, there is abundant seed sources that have been sitting in the soil since the last fire, even though as many places it was 100 years ago. And those seeds are going to regenerate and reestablish. And so it's one thing we've learned over the years about Chaparral regeneration after fire. And that is it's not heavily affected by fire size.

It has plenty of seeds in the soil, and a good number of the species actually regenerate by sprouting from the base of the burned out skeletons. So we generally don't think fire seeds. size is a big inhibitor to recovery and chaparral. But in a lot of cases, humans have introduced other types of disturbance. And under those conditions, we do need to think about ways to restore areas where the natural system has been disrupted. I can see the optimism that you have about this. I guess you have to be an optimist to work in this field. You have to be an optimist.

Restoration requires a lot of stubborn determination. That's a good place. Stand up. conversation. And optimism. And optimism. Don Quixote in all of you. Yes. Erin Questette is a restoration ecologist, associate professor of biology at Cal Poly and Pomona, John Keely Research Scientist at the USGS Survey at the Sequoia National Park. Thank you both for taking time to speak with us today. Thank you, Ira. Thank you. You're welcome. If you had a number one hit song, I bet you would remember writing it, right? John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote over 200 songs together. That was over 50 years ago, though, so it's

no surprise that memories have gotten a little fuzzy when it comes to who wrote which Beatles song. Let me give you an example. Take the 1965 song in my life. John claims to have written that tune, but Paul remembers

it differently. The two Beatles agreed to disagree. But die-hard fans remain curious. But die-hard fans remain curious. Was there a way to get closer to the truth? True Beatle fans will tell you that they're more partial to songs written by Paul or by John. There's something in the songs themselves that make them unique to the songwriter. My next guest is one such curious fan as well as a Harvard statistician.

He has developed an algorithm to determine the authorship of In My Life and several other contested Beatles songs by identifying what makes a song as a John song, or a Paul song. Dr. Mark Glickman, Senior Lecture on Statistics and the Department of Statistics at Harvard, he's here with his guitar. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you very much for having me. So how do you break down a song in a way that will tell who wrote it? Well, there are lots of ways to take a song and break it down into its constituent parts, and the way that we did it was to borrow from some ideas that are used in analysis of text documents. There's a long history of analyzing sequences of words to be able to distinguish different authors, and we applied the same kind of

idea to musical content of songs. So, for example, in an individual song, there's a melody line, and there's also a chord sequence. So if you treat the melody line, the notes in a melody line, almost as if that's the words in the document, as well as having the chord sequence, which could also be viewed as like another dictionary of words that are in a document. You can use the same kind of analysis, which basically is examining the frequencies of certain kinds of words and certain kinds of chords or certain notes sequences or chord sequences as the way of establishing the fingerprint for a songwriter. All right. Let's go down to brass tags here. Let's talk about McCartney versus, you know, what makes a Paul McCartney song a Paul.

Paul's song. So there are a bunch of little things that came out of our model. I suppose some of these ideas are somewhat known. Others maybe not so much. One thing that is actually sort of known among maybe hardcore Beatles fans is that with the melody line, Paul tended to take a lot more liberties and tended to jump around a lot. And just as an example, there are exactly two songs, two Lenin McCarney songs over the period of songs that we incorporated into our work, which was basically songs from 1962 to 66, which is all the songs in the years that the Beatles were touring and didn't enter the studio yet full-time. There are two songs in that period where the melodic jump is more than an octave. So in other words, I mean, I'm happy to just

Demonstrate that. Yeah, go ahead. Okay, sure. So, all right, so the very first song that Paul McCartney ever recorded for the Beatles is the song, Love Me Do. I'm going to embarrass myself by playing a little bit of, well, I'm going to sing a little bit of it, but I'll very quickly move to the part of the song where there's the octave jump. But just to remind your listeners, Love Me Do is like,

Love Me Do, you know I love you. And then it fast forwards to the bridge where it goes, someone to love, someone like you. And so that jump from someone to love. Love, where is it? Love. And then it jumps to some. So that jump from to is an octave and a semitone.

And that's a huge jump. And that's a signature then of his work. And so that's a distinct. featuring feature of Paul's song. And so just as another quick example, your listeners may know the song Eleanor Rigby, which is another Paul song. You know, so that goes, Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in a, but where's, where's she pick it up, picks up the rice in a church where blah, blah, blah, blah. So the part where it's, it jumps more than an octave, which is even bigger jump than in Love Me Do is, all the lonely people

where do they all belong so that jump from where do they all belong is an octave and a third so that's huge and there are no John songs that have jumps that big so what is John signature then so interestingly

John songs tend to be using more standard more standard musical motif. So as I can give one example would be, we discovered that there's a particular chord change, which is a pretty common one in probably most of pop music and just to play the example. It goes from the tonic to the minor six. Now, that sounds all very complicated,

but in fact, for those of you who are listening, it's basically going from the major key to the relative minor. So it might sound like this. This is just the two chords. So it goes from, say, this chord to this chord. So those two in sequence sound very natural to very natural progression. And that particular chord sequence occurs with much, much greater frequency in John's songs than in Paul's songs. For example.

So as an example, yeah. Yeah, so the John Lennon song, It's Only Love, actually starts exactly with that alternation. So it's... So those two chords just go in sequence. And that's characteristic of John. He ends up using common chord changes. And he also ends up using notes on the diatonic scale much more often than Paul McCartney does. Paul McCartney tends to do, you know, he tended to do more unusual things musically than John Lennon did.

Let me just remind our listeners that this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with the very musical Mark Lickman, who is a static. So you've taken a statistical analysis of this. Yeah, so who then wrote in my life? Well, you know, I personally came into. this, not being entirely sure, I guess I probably would have thought originally it sounded like it was a John Lennon song, you know, based on the lyrics, it sounds kind of like John because it's, you know, sort of reflective and, you know, Paul McCartney tended to write much more love-focused

lyrics, and this one tended to be a little bit more, you know, recollections. But what came out of our model, you know, if you believe the way we constructed the model, there's a 98-point, you point two percent chance that this was written by John Lennon and only a 1.8 percent chance that it was written by Paul McCartney. And, you know, I think there's no dispute that John Lennon actually wrote the lyrics. You know, I think Paul McCartney's side of the story was that John wrote the lyrics and then just kind of handed it to him and say, here, you figure this out. And that, you know, that's how Paul remembers it. But, you know, John basically said, you know, this is pretty much my song with Paul McCartney helping on the bridge. But according to our model, the, you know,

the song is pretty solidly a John Lennon song. Has this news gotten back to Paul? Do you know? Well, I read that there were some reporters that heard about this story and, you know, knocked on his door. And apparently he said no comment. Or at least that it didn't get past his entourage who would particularly ask them. But, you know, just as well, I don't want to go to my dying day with Paul McCartney hating me. Yeah. Well, speaking of hating you, I mean, not that other people who hate you. Great.

But they're going to be lawyers, right, who are listening to your statistics. And we always hear of controversies about, hey, somebody stole my musical type or a song or phrase or something. Have they been knocking on your door? No, fortunately, no lawyers. I mean, we're not, you know, we're not, you know, trying to. said all this in cement, you know, we're being very careful in saying that, you know, we're making certain assumptions in our model. We, you know, we identify what amounts to 149 different musical features. And it's entirely possible that we're missing some crucial ones. So, you know, to the

extent that you believe that the 149 features captures, you know, most of the signature of a song, then, you know, then it's probably worth, to some degree, believing the results of our model. But That said, you know, every good statistician is careful to point out that, you know, probability prediction is only as good as the assumptions in a model. So, you know, if the model assumptions aren't quite right, then, you know, then, you know, there's certainly a dose of healthy skepticism. But, you know, we think we did a decent job capturing the, you know, the main feature. So, well, two million people will be listening to this and I think some record producers going to knock out. your door now to give you. Great. Can't wait. Give you a new career as a recording on it. Yeah, well, I'm changing my phone number. Okay. Thank you very much. Mark Glickman.

Any relation to Marty Glickman? Any relation? Any relation to me? Any relation? Any relation? No, no, no. I've been asked that for many years. No, no. No relation. Mark Glickman, senior lecture on statistics in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University. Good luck to you. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thanks for having me on Yontershiel. One last thing before we go. Anna and Ella have been busy working on season two of our podcast, Undiscovered, and it's coming out next month. But if you can't wait that long, Undiscovered co-host Annie Minoff,

will be joining authors David Kwamey and Simon Gummery for a celebration of great science writing. That's going to be at the American Writers Museum in Chicago next Thursday, August 6th. That's next week, August 16th. I said 616th. Thursday, August 16th. tickets and information are available at ScienceFriiday.com slash events. Chicago, August 16th, undiscovered. Charles Berkowitz is our director, senior producer, Christopher and Taliatta.

Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Haller. Our intern is Lucy Wong. We had technical engineering help from Rich and Rich Kamen, Sarah Fishman. I'm Heroflito in New York.