Science Friday - Parker Solar Probe, Slime Molds. Dec 6, 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: December 6, 2019

In August 2018, NASA sent the Parker Solar Probe off on its anticipated seven-year-long mission to study the sun. Already, it has completed three of its 24 scheduled orbits, and data from two of those orbits are already telling us things we didn’t know about the star at the center of our solar system. The probe has collected information on the factors that influence the speed of solar wind, the amount of dust in the sun’s bubble-like region—the heliosphere—and also where scientists’ models were wrong.  David McComas, professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University and principal investigator of the integrated science investigation of the sun, breaks down the very first data collected from the Parker Solar Probe mission. He’s joined by Aleida Higginson, Parker Solar Probe deputy project scientist for science operations, who will update us on the mission that’s giving us an unprecedented look at our sun. What makes a creature charismatic?  In our new segment, we’ll feature one creature a month, and try to convince you that it’s worthy of the coveted Charismatic Creature title. By “creature” we mean almost anything—animals, viruses, subterranean fungal networks, you name it. And by “charismatic,” we don’t just mean cute, clever, or even all that nice! We just mean they have that special something that makes us want to lean in and learn everything about them—because they can’t all be baby pandas. Over the past two months, we’ve received dozens of listener suggestions—everything from turtles to tardigrades. We had to choose just one, and we’re starting simple—single celled simple. Our first charismatic creature is Physarum polycephalum, the “multi-headed” slime mold. Despite having no brain or neurons and being just one giant goopy cell, these slime molds keep defying our expectations. They can solve mazes, recreate the Tokyo railway network (animation below), learn, and even anticipate events. They can make rational and irrational choices that mirror our own. Not to mention they’re visually stunning too.   Despite having no brain or neurons and being just one giant goopy cell, these slime molds keep defying our expectations. They can solve mazes, recreate the Tokyo railway network (animation below), learn, and even anticipate events. They can make rational and irrational choices that mirror our own. Not to mention they’re visually stunning too.   Joining Ira to make the case that slime molds are uniquely charismatic is Science Friday’s Elah Feder and collective intelligence researchers Simon Garnier from New Jersey Institute of Technology and Tanya Latty from the University of Sydney. Oregon is not very good at recycling, and it’s getting worse, according to a new report. Overall recycling rates in the state have steadily declined for the last several years, even as the amount of waste generated per person in the state has grown. The report, published Thursday by the group Environment Oregon, uses data released yearly by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. It finds that Oregon faces major barriers to meeting its recycling goals. Nationally, recyclable plastics are being replaced with lower-value plastics. In Oregon, polystyrene (the flaky, foam-like material used in single-use coffee cups) isn’t recycled by municipal governments, and a legislative proposal to ban it statewide failed last year. Consumers can take certain polystyrene products to privately run drop boxes in some cities around the state. This doesn’t mean that Oregonians aren’t passionate about recycling. The biggest barrier to recycling in Oregon is structural: less of the material placed in recycling bins can be repurposed by domestic facilities, and exporting recyclables to countries like China has become more difficult. “The bottom line is, we need to take more of these products out of the waste stream,” Celeste Meiffren-Swango, the state director of Environment Oregon, said. It’s not just an Oregon problem, it’s a national—even global—issue. For years, recycling in the United States has relied on Asian countries to take our waste. Many countries, finding that arrangement unprofitable, have started incinerating the recycling, dumping it in landfills, or simply stopped accepting recyclables from the United States altogether. The few countries that still purchase U.S. recyclables are increasingly facing unexpected health impacts stemming from too much waste and no way to process it.     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. Later in the hour, the first data from the Parker Solar Probe has been collected and analyzed, and it shows surprising and unexpected behaviors of the sun. We'll get into that. But first, remember we talked a few weeks ago about how scientists are working to rebuild coral reefs by planting little nubbins of coral that are more resistant to warming, or by plugging 3D-printed corals into degraded habitats, to give reef-dwelling fish and urchins somewhere to live while the reef recovers. But how do you actually get all that marine life to return to a recovering reef?

Well, you put on the soundtrack of a healthy reef. And when the fish hear that, they start coming and swimming back. And here to talk about the theory behind that tactic is my guest, Amy Nordrum, news editor at the ICCLE spectrum. Joins us here in New York. Always welcome to have you back. Hi, Ira. Amy. All right, tell us about this coral reef noise idea.

Yeah, who knew reefs were so noisy. And to be clear, that sound you just heard is sort of like a highlight reel or a greatest hits version of what you might hear. All those sounds wouldn't occur at once necessarily in nature. But this was a really interesting piece of work where scientists off of the coast of Australia built 33 artificial reefs and installed underwater loudspeakers on 11 of them. And then they played recordings throughout the night that they had collected prior to a, bleaching that had occurred in this area. And then they measured and saw which kinds of species and how many fish returned to each of the artificial reefs.

Let's listen to that again because it was so interesting. Wow. That is the best hit. The best hits. Yeah. There's a lot of noises going on in there. There's some snapping shrimp that snapped their claws at each other. There's some clownfish, which are really territorial and make noises sort of like a woodpecker

at each other. Then there's a couple mystery fish mixed in that the researchers couldn't identify based on the noises. But fish who returned to the reefs with the loudspeakers more than the reefs that didn't have loudspeakers. They actually attracted twice as many fish and 50% more species. And did they stay around? They stuck around throughout the length of the study, which is about 40 days, and so they're hoping that that will last. And this isn't, you know, a silver bullet. You'd obviously need the restoration efforts along with it that you spoke about before. But at least in terms of getting the fish to know that the reef is available, you know, they can hear this noise and

and then recognize it as a place that they might like to go. It almost sounds like there's something unethical about tricking a fish. I asked about that. Is this like a bait-in switch effort? But the scientist I spoke with Tim Gordon, he was telling me that, you know, in practice, you would make this a pleasant place, you know, for the fish to live. And the sound would just be to attract them there in the beginning. And they're working on putting this out in the real world in a project in Southeast Asia right now.

So it's all experimental right now. Yeah, this was a proof of concept, and now they're hoping to roll it out. I can't wait. All right. Next up, you have a story about an innovative new way to transplant hearts. Really interesting. Yes, right now, you know, hearts are recovered from donors, typically after they've been declared brain dead, and while the heart is still beating.

But there's a new technology being tested in a clinical trial that allows doctors to recover a heart from a donor after circulatory death. So these patients are never declared brain dead, but are taken off of mechanical support for other reasons. And typically, you wouldn't be able to recover organs from these donors because there's a period where the heart stops beating and isn't receiving oxygen or blood flow. And instead of putting the hearts on ice to preserve them as is typical, for these cases, Duke is testing out a new technology, helps to revive and rehabilitate the heart and circulate

the heart and circulate blood through and pump oxygen in until it's ready to go into a recipient. And Duke researchers perform their first transplant using this technology just last Sunday. So they had to make a special box to put the heart in not an ice box, but the heart is beating in a box. circulating blood through it. Exactly. It's created by this company. It's known as the Transmedics OCS system. The system is already approved for use in other parts of the world, but is currently in a clinical trial here in the U.S., and that's what the Duke researchers were participating in. Imagine how many people's lives could be saved now with this technique. Yeah, the doctor I spoke with said one of his colleagues did a calculation that it could expand the donor pool by 30%. Wow, that's a lot

of hearts. Your next couple of stories are about space. Let's talk about first a mission to deflect an asteroid? Yes, this is a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, and it has two parts. The first part is an independent NASA mission called Dart, where they're sending a very simple spacecraft out to an asteroid called Didomos B, and it's orbiting actually around another asteroid, and NASA's spacecraft is going to ram into that asteroid and attempt to change its orbit. And then last week, the second part of this collaboration called the Hira mission was approved by the European Space Agency, and they'll be sending a spacecraft out a few years after the

DART impact to study both asteroids in the system in more detail. I wouldn't imagine you have to be very careful which way you nudge that asteroid. Yes, fortunately, NASA is pretty careful about these things. You know, the sense that I asked them, you know, could you possibly redirect it in the wrong way? And they are specifically targeting this asteroid system. It's actually got two asteroids in it. And I didn't know this, but a lot of asteroids come in pairs or threes or fours.

Yeah, so it's a big asteroid and a tiny asteroid orbiting around the big one, and they're targeting the tiny one, and the spacecraft they're going to slam into it isn't really big enough to knock the tiny one out of its whole orbit around the big one. It's just big enough to hopefully just change the orbit slightly. So that's why one reason they chose this specific system is because it lowers that possibility. Another proof of concept. Exactly. And then there's a new Chinese experiment to listen to the cosmic dawn and the cosmic dark ages. You got me intrigued. Right. Well, if you look up at the moon tonight, you can't see it, but there's a satellite right now on the opposite side of the moon. Its main job is to relay messages between Earth and a lander on the moon service that was placed there by China's Space Agency. But it also has a secondary mission, which is to turn itself into a radio telescope that peers out into the rest of the universe and listens for signals that are so low frequency. We couldn't detect them here on Earth because of interference in the ionosphere. And just in the last couple weeks, antennas for that experiment were deployed.

on the satellite and are starting to collect data. And finally, you brought us a mystery of shrinking songbirds, not of songbird populations, but the birds themselves. The birds themselves, yes. There's an incredible collection of songbirds, migratory birds, at the Chicago Field Museum, a huge collection built up by a man named David Willard, who collected and measured by hand birds that had flown into high-rise buildings

and been killed in Chicago. And this city took a look at more than 70,000 specimens from that collection, from 52 different species and measured how they changed over the years that this collection was amassed about 40 years. And they found that as temperatures became warmer, the body size of the birds actually got smaller, and the wings became longer. So, you know, we think about climate change and how animals might respond, and they might shift their range or change to the timing of behaviors like reproduction. Well, now, you know, we know with these birds, they're also already changing their morphology. Unexpected consequences. Yes.

Thank you, Amy. Thanks. Amy Norgium, the news editor at the ICCLEE Spectrum here in New York. 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.

You know, this time of the year, chances are good that you'll find the 1946 classic. It's a wonderful life. It's playing somewhere. Remember this Prussian prediction? We're listening, Sam. Yeah, as predict. plastics became a huge business, but we never foresaw what the huge problem of getting rid of them, right?

And we all thought, well, we'll just recycle them. And as we know, it's not turning out to be that easy. Joining me now to talk about what plastics are doing to waste management in Oregon. Is Erin Ross a science writer and researcher at Oregon Public Broadcasting in Portland? Welcome. Hi, Ira. So tell us there's a new report out on Oregon State recycling levels. How is it doing? Not great. The data's from 2017. That's the most recent year we have numbers for, and the percent of waste that's being recycled or composted has declined. It's down to just about a quarter, about 27 percent of our waste is recycled, and that's a little lower than 2016 and almost 5 percent lower than 2014. So what's causing the drop?

It's mostly the collapse of international markets. So sorting and cleaning recycling is really expensive. So for a long time, the U.S. would just send bales of plastic to China, where it would sometimes be recycled, and it was a lot cheaper than doing it here. But near the end of 2017, China stopped accepting these products. It just wasn't financially viable for them to keep on recycling plastic, which was often contaminated and impure. So other countries started accepting it, and the U.S. just kind of started shipping it to other places.

But like in the case of Malaysia, they just shipped it right back. They didn't want our contaminated plastic. So now sometimes it's burned. And we know that plastics are a growing component of our waste, right? So there's more and more of it. Exactly. And we're also making more waste. When we were in the recession, our waste production dropped nationally.

And then we're buying more. We're making more waste. So it's not a question of just doing a better job of sorting the things at home, you know, being for plastic number one and then for number two, stuff like that. No, unfortunately. And this actually kind of blew my mind when I learned it. But even like supposedly pure plastics are contaminated. So two number one soda bottles might not be recyclable together.

And since plastics can only be recycled so many times before they lose their value, it's kind of always been this red herring. Wait a minute. So I'm not the number one bottle and a second number one bottle may not be the same plastic. Yeah, yeah, they might not be the same plastic, which is really wild. That is wild. And it's not that the people in Oregon are bad. The state bottle bill has been very successful, right? Yeah, so Oregon had the first bottle bill in the country, which is where consumers pay a deposit on like glass or aluminum or plastic, and then they get it back when they return the empties to the state. And it's always been really successful. And in 2017, actually, the year that we have this data from, Oregon raised the deposit. And so now almost all bottle bill eligible materials are recycled. So that kind of makes this drop in total recycling levels, though, even more kind of poignant because we're doing a lot better at recycling some things.

So even with that increase, we're still losing ground overall. We're still making more waste. So what are they suggesting that people do? Is there anything they can do other than using less stuff? Unfortunately, there isn't really. For a long time, you know, people who study recycling have been warning us that plastic recycling just really wasn't feasible long term. So reducing is always the best option. We can also always try to reuse.

So if you get, say, like a yogurt tub, trying to repurpose. that for something using it for leftovers. I mean, it's getting at least one more life that way. And, of course, yeah. Yeah. You know, I found that you can really reuse a big Ziploc bag a few times. If it's not really that dirty, they're just, you know, holding some big things in it sometimes. So that's my suggestion, Erin Ross.

Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Aaron Ross, science writer and researcher at Oregon Public Broadcasting in Portland. Have a good weekend. We're going to take a break when we come back. The Strange Behaviors of the Sun. There is a Parker Solar Probe, it's called. and it's sending back its first data. It's the closest thing we've ever sent to the sun.

And some interesting findings that were unexpected are coming back in the data. So stay with us. We'll talk with some of the mission science to step after the break. Don't go away. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Last August, NASA's Parker's solar probe set off on a nearly seven-year mission to study the sun. And to date, it's completed three of its 24 scheduled orbits.

And data from two of those orbits, are already telling us things we didn't know about the star at the center of our solar system, like what influences the speed of solar wind or the amount of dust in the sun's heliosphere and also where scientists' models were wrong. Yeah, some interesting stuff. And here to tell us how new data from the Parker Solar Probe

is shining light on the mysteries of the sun are my guests. Dr. David McComis, principal investigator of the Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun and Professor of Astrophysical Science at Princeton. Welcome, Dr. Hadesh. Welcome, Dr. Aleda Higginson, Parker Solar Probe Deputy Project Scientist for Science Operations

at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. Dr. Higginson, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me. Let me ask you first. Remind us what the Parker Solar Probe was sent out there to look at. What are the questions we wanted to answer? Dr. Higginson. Yeah, so there were three things we most wanted to investigate.

One is why the corona is so much hotter than the surface of the sun. So the corona is the atmosphere that surrounds the sun, and the surface is 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit. So that's unbelievably hot. But the atmosphere itself, the corona, is over 2 million degrees Fahrenheit. And we just don't understand why, as you move away from the sun, the source of heat, things get hotter. One of the other things we wanted to study was what accelerates the solar wind.

You know, the solar wind is an ionized gas that's moving away from the sun in all directions all the time. It completely fills the solar system. And it influences everything that happens in the upper atmosphere of all of our planets. And there's a lot that we don't understand about how it forms. And so we really needed to go there and find out. David, so it's only just gotten started, right? Three of 24 total orbits completed, but we already have some data coming back about the solar wind. That's really interesting.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And in fact, these first three orbits were the furthest ones of the 24. As the mission goes on, we'll get closer and closer to the sun. And so let's talk about the solar wind. What has it told us so far? What kinds of mysteries has it uncovered or questions it's answered? So a good example is as we got in close to the sun, we didn't expect to see rotational motion of the solar wind plasma with the sun, something we call co-rotation. We expected co-rotation to break much further down, closer to the sun, maybe a 10, 15 solar radii.

But all the way out at 35 to 40 solar radii, we still see much of the plasma, the solar wind plasma, sort of co-rotating with the sun and still being connected to the rotational motion of the sun. That's totally different than we expected with our models and theories. So what does it look like and compare it to something we see on Earth? So, for example, if you imagine some children on a merry-go-round, maybe spinning faster and faster as they run around the sides, they're co-rotating with the merry-go-round. If they can run fast enough eventually, they can make it go so fast they can't hang on. At that point, they go shooting out to the sides, excuse me,

and that would be the breaking from co-rotation. So it's interesting that we're seeing all the way into 35 to 40 solar radii still a lot of co-rotation. And there's something really interested about the solar wind. It's not going in a straight line coming out from the sun? Well, there's this co-rotational part. But the other another interesting thing about the solar wind is we're seeing the magnetic field that's embedded in the solar wind, not just being straight or fairly straight, but we're seeing things we call switchbacks, which are sort of S-shaped pieces of magnetic.

field, which are coming out from the sun embedded in the solar wind flow. That's quite, and was that something predicted, Dr. Higgins, or was it something unexpected? Well, in some sense, we were expecting to see that. There was a previous mission called Helios, which did not get nearly as close to the sun, but it did start to see these switchbacks from the solar wind. But when we couldn't figure out what they were, we kind of put them to the side. And then as we were getting ready to launch Parker Solar Probe, we started talking about it again. But we really weren't sure what we were going to see as we moved in closer.

And the real surprise is just how huge these structures are when you start to get really close to the sun. Do you have any guesses or surmising about what might be happening here? Well, I mean, there are several theories. Every scientist right now has their pet theory. one of them is that there's this magnetic reconnection process that's happening in the corona of the sun or maybe in the young solar wind where magnetic fields are actually not originally in this shape, but then they reconnect together. They kind of break themselves apart and tie themselves back together in this new shape and that that somehow is moving out into the solar wind. But we really don't understand how that process is actually happening. No, none of our models predict that it should be there. Our number 8447-24-8255, if you'd like to talk about the sun. You know, I find so many things about the sun amazing, like the mysteries that you mention. Why is the surface of the sun like 6,000 degrees, and then you move away into the corona?

It's millions of degrees. Where could that energy be coming from? Any idea about what's happening with that, Dr. Higginson or Dr. McCamas? Well, I would say that we have some theories. but we don't have an answer. All the way back to the namesake of the mission, Eugene Parker, he's talked about things called nanoflars. And one of his ideas was the heating of the corona

and ultimately providing energy to accelerate the solar wind might come from little tiny magnetic reconnections like we're just being described, feeding energy into the system. And so that's a model. There are other ideas about solar wind turbulence, feeding in energy, and other things. But without going in very close to the sun,

it's impossible to have the data to be able to separate between these different ideas. You know, we talk a lot about how there's so much dark matter in the universe and in our solar system could be, and I'm just guessing here, thinking out loud, could there be something to do with the dark matter here that we don't see interconnecting somehow? Has anybody thought about that? Nobody wants to take. No one wants to go it on the limb. Probably not. Hard matter is not something that really think about.

That's okay. I've been more stupid than this lots of times. I understand that the solar probe is using Venus to Dr. Higginson to get closer and closer to the sun. How does that work? Yeah, that's right. So Parker Solar Probe is going to do seven Venus flybys. So we've already done one. That was the first one we did before the first encounter. And we're going to do the second, actually, on December 26th, just in like 20 days.

And this is when Parker Solar Probe's orbit encounters the orbit of Venus, and Venus happens to actually be there. And so it enters into kind of this sphere of influence around Venus, and Venus's gravity pulls on the spacecraft in such a way that it slows it down. So the speed that the spacecraft has relative to the sun, as it's moving around in its orbit, it actually slows down. And this causes Parker Solar Probe to actually fall in a little bit closer to the sun. So we're going to do this seven times, and that means that we have seven kind of incremental steps closer and closer to the sun for each of the closest approaches that we have. Interesting. David, what about the small energetic particles events? What are they and why is that significant? Yeah, so this is another really fascinating piece of the story. Out of Earth's orbit, we see large energetic particle events. They're actually very important because they can affect satellite performance.

performance that can affect the ability of astronauts to be out in deep space and things like that. Because they're a type of radiation. But we don't see really tiny events. And what we've learned is we've gotten closer and closer to the sun with Parker Solar Probe is that there's sort of a spectrum of smaller and smaller events. And that's really important because it may be providing the seed particles that ultimately get accelerated up in these larger, much more dangerous events. Interesting.

844-724-8255 is our number. Let's go to San Francisco Morali. Welcome to Science Friday. Let's see if we can get, did we lose Morali? No, not quite there yet. Let me continue. So how close is the solar probe to the sun right now, David? How much closer is it going to get?

So the first three orbits had perihelia or closest point in the orbit of about 36 solar radii. By the time we get into the last three orbits will be inside of 10 solar radii. And so if you've seen an eclipse, for example, you see the moon in front of the sun. Imagine the width of that moon four and a half times out to the side. That's where we'd be. So we'd basically be in the corona itself, flying through the corona itself that you can see in eclipses. That's good that you bring that up because I now have Morelli from San Francisco on the phone. Hi, welcome.

Why don't you ask your question, please? Sure. My question is, how do they measure the 2 million temperature? in the corona because I would assume that any probe would melt if it got that close to the sun. Hmm. How do you measure 2 million degrees without melting? David, laid out? Sure.

I'll take this. Okay. There's a very specialized heat shield on the front of the solar probe, and so it absorbs heat that then we dump out the sides, basically. So most of the instrumentation is actually behind the heat shield in a shadow behind the spacecraft. One of the instruments sticks out and actually is made out of ceramics and able to measure this. But the key is that the temperature is high, but the density of the material is low. So the total amount of energy deposited by that high temperature is still small enough that we can manage it through proper thermal control on the spacecraft.

So it's like you're saying, the energy hitting is so, is very hot, but its density is so small. It doesn't really impact it very much. That's correct. Alida, while getting any data back from the probe is exciting, are you more excited for a specific orbit? Are you waiting for some orbit that's going to, you know, be the bingo orbit for you? Well, I mean, we don't know what we're going to find as we move closer and closer to the sun.

One of the things that as a heliophysicist that studies of solar wind we're really excited to detect is something called the Alphane point, which is where the solar wind, which is where the solar wind starts moving faster than a wave in a magnetic field can move. And so this is really the point at which the physics transitions from kind of solar wind physics to, you know, kind of coronal physics. And traditionally we thought that this point was pretty low down to the sun, but there's been some evidence recently that maybe on just this next closest orbit or maybe the one after we might actually get there and be able to cross this Alfane point.

And I mean, that's just going to make history for heliophysics if we can do that. In what way? Well, I mean, it's a regime that we've never been able to take measurements in before. And I have a feeling that there are going to be a lot of sad plasma physicists whose theories break once we get that data back. You're hoping about that? So what happens as you get closer to the sun? How does the atmosphere that the probe is traveling in? You started to say that these things are going to change.

In what way will it change? So the magnetic field gets stronger for one, and that really influences the way that energy is transported through the plasma itself. And then the density goes up as well, which is something that also really matters for that. So, you know, we have experiments here on Earth that are able to tell us something about what the physics looks like there, but really to actually understand it, we need to go to the best lab ever, and that's the Sun's Corona. And what will be the ultimate fate of the probe? David? Well, the orbit that we end up in, after we have our seventh fly-by of Venus, is actually a long-term stable orbit,

so we'll stay in that orbit a very, very long time. There are still expendables left on the spacecraft, extra rocket fuel and things that we need. So it's quite possible that the mission will last long beyond 2025 and will continue to get great science out of it. Eventually, something will fail on the spacecraft. It always does, but most NASA spacecraft last far longer than they were originally designed for. So we're really hopeful for a very, very long time

of observing the sun with Parker. That's great. I'm Ira Plato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Dr. David then McCamas and Dr. Aleda Higginson about the Parker Space probe. Let's see we have a few more people. Oh, yeah, I want to talk about,

here's an interesting question from Wynn in Menlo Park, California. Hi, Wynne. Hi, thank you very much. My question is we know an awful lot about how the planets are affected by the sun, but what is there in the universe that affects the sun the most? Hmm. Any answer to that, David or Aleda? What is there out there?

I guess when you look into our solar system, you see the sun and then you see Jupiter, right? It's the biggest thing, two things there. What out there affects us? I mean, the answer I would give is the heliosphere as a whole is affected by the material outside. It's the interaction of this expanding million mile an hour solar wind that's flowing out from the sun, all directions in space all the time, and the in-flowing material from the local interstellar medium. And the interaction between those two forms the heliosphere, region of influence of our sun.

And so there's, as the sun has gone around the galaxy a couple of times, it bobs up and down across the equator and the interaction between the local interstellar medium and the sun has varied a lot over time. It's not exactly how the outside affects the sun per se, but it is how the outside affects the heliosphere. Alita, why is it so hard to understand what's going on inside the sun that causes the corona, the temperature problems we don't understand? I mean, it's a nuclear, basically, fusion experiment going on in there, right?

Not an experiment, but it's a reaction. Do we not understand enough about that? Yeah, well, it's hard to understand what's going on under the surface of the sun. That's definitely true. I mean, one of the problems that Parker won't be able to answer, but that, you know, heliophysicists have, in general, is to understand the solar dynamo, And this is the process that actually generates the magnetic field of the sun, which then Parker can study once it gets into the corona. And this is what causes these activity cycles that the sun has, where it goes from what we call solar min to solar max.

And these are minimum periods of activity and then maximum periods of activity where you have these really large energetic particle events or coronal mass ejections. So, yeah, it's hard to understand what's going. on inside the sun, but we would love to figure that out. Well, we run out of time, but I think the most fascinating thing I've heard about the sun is that the light generated within the middle of it, where it's very, very hot. The photons can take 100,000 or a million years to get to the surface to escape. Is that right? It's amazing.

Yep, yeah, that's right. Then just a few minutes to get here. That's amazing. Okay. We've run out of the time. We'll check back with you when the next round of the data comes in, okay? That sounds great, I think so much. You're welcome.

Dr. David McComis, principal investigator of the Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun, Professor of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University, and Dr. Aleda Hickinson, Parker Solar Probe Deputy Project Scientist for Science Operations at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about a creature that has no brain, no neurons, but can solve mazes, and it can eat. even learn. And you can have one of them for your own. If you'd like, we'll tell you how. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. And now it's time for our very first

charismatic creature corner. Sorry. Sorry. Some of that, some of, it's going to be a fun segment. Some of our favorite stories about creatures, bees, bats, birds, even the bacteria in your gut. Well, and starting this week, we'll be featuring one charismatic creature a month. And by creature, we mean anything. Animals, viruses, carnivorous plants, you name it. And by charismatic, we really mean intriguing, charming, worthy of your curiosity. But we'll let you decide if a creature makes the cut. Making the case for today's creature is our charismatic creature correspondent, Science Friday's own Ella Fetter.

Hi. Hey, hey, Iris. Sorry about all that alliteration. So we asked our listeners on the Science Friday Vox Pop app for suggestions for creatures, and they had a lot. Yes, please talk a lot more about the tardigrades. I'd like to learn more about tardigrades. Penguins. Narwhals.

Tartigrades. I would like to know more about the emperor penguin. Four-legged snake. The Wolverine. Dumbot octopus. Also, I think, known as the water bears. Musk turtles. Brown, Japanese marmarated stink bug.

Thank you. Thank you. So first, thank you to everybody who submitted suggestions. You can still submit them on the Science Friday Vox Pop app at the end of this segment. So a lot of people were hoping for narwhals or penguins or tardigrades were really popular. And I totally get that. I really like them too. But these creatures would not be particularly challenging for our very first charismatic creature corner

because they are undeniably oozing with charm. I get it. And speaking of oozing. That's my segue. That's for you. We did get this message from Ronnie in Coutersport, Pennsylvania. I am curious about slime molds. I have heard that they solve mazes.

And I'd like to know more about creatures who do problem solving without having a brain. So, Ira, today I am here to convince you. that slime molds are charismatic creatures. I'm going to have some help from two researchers. I'm going to talk to you about one slime mold in particular. Okay, but first you have to tell me what exactly is a slime mold. What is this? Okay, I'm going to start by telling you what is not a slime mold or what a slime mold is not.

It's not a mold, actually. That's a misnomer. It's not a plant or an animal or a bacterium or any kind of fungus. It is a protest, which actually does not. mean a lot. The kingdom protista is kind of a junkyard for the natural world. It's where we stick all of those creatures that are really hard to classify. So slime molds are kind of a blobby thing. You can find them in leaf litter growing under logs inside rotting wood. There are a lot of different species with delightful names like dog vomit and wolf's milk. But today we're going to talk about

one species called phaserum polycephalum. which is the many-headed slime mold. But to learn more about them, I actually called up a researcher in Sydney earlier this week, Tanya Laddi. She studies collective intelligence. And just to paint a picture for our listeners, here's Tanya explaining what these look like. So they're yellow. They're really mucousy and sticky.

And, I mean, if you touch them, they just kind of goop up your hands, really. I mean, it's not something you really want to be touching at all. They move so slowly. You can't quite see them moving. They have a, what I think is a lovely floral smell, but everyone else tells me is gross. So, yeah, they basically just look like mucus. That's really what a slime mold looks like, like patterned mucus. Hmm.

So it doesn't sound great. They can actually be really, really beautiful. We have some pictures up at science friday.com slash slime mold. So they look like patterned mucus. So far, so good. I hear I hear getting, they're getting trendiest pets in France. Is that right? What do you need to know to have them as a pet?

Yeah, that's what I heard from a researcher in France. They're the new Tamagotchi pet. Okay, so if you're going to have a pet, which I do, slime molds like darkness, moisture. They also really like rolled oats, apparently. They really go wild for these. No one knows why. I hear the American strain really likes the Quaker brand for some reason. So if you give them a rolled oat, they will slime over to it.

it, engulf it, and pulse, which is apparently something they do when they really like their food. And what don't they like? What do you have to avoid with that? You want to avoid light and dryness. So they like it dark and moist. So like our listener, Ronnie mentioned, these goopy, mucasy things, they can do really incredible things like solve mazes. But here is the truly astounding part. These creatures, organisms, if you want to call them, they are just one cell. They are one cell with a lot of nuclei. All the yellow goo, even when you see them and they're like, you know, half a meter across in size, all of that goo is one single cell. It's a unicellular organism. And it can get to those sizes because it has these millions of nuclei that just keep dividing

inside of the same membrane. So you wind up with this enormous creature, but because you know, they're all sharing a single sort of envelope, it's still technically one cell. So, as you know, most cells are actually invisible to the naked eye. You need a microscope to see them. The ones in Daniel's lap get up to about 12 inches in diameter. And there is one slime mold species that allegedly, this needs to be independently verified, but allegedly, it could cover 10 square feet and weigh as much as 44 pounds. Get out. Allegedly. 44 pounds square feet. It's pretty cool.

I mean, that's, it's a one cell. That's astounding. So this is where I think it gets truly interesting. Slime molds for one giant goopy cell are way smarter than they have any business being. And it actually, it took people a long time to notice. They were used as model organisms in labs for decades, but really just to study cell mechanics. They're really handy because, one, they're, as we mentioned, visible. You can also cut them up into little pieces, and then each of those little pieces becomes its own independent slime mold.

And people weren't really thinking about things like, what can a slime mold do? How do they behave until a Japanese researcher in 2000 changed all that? So to tell us more, we have Simone Garnier. He's an associate professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and he works on swarm intelligence. Simon, welcome to the show. Hi, how are you? Good, how are you? Hey there, welcome.

Pretty good, thank you. So just, yeah. No, good. Okay. To start us off, what did this Japanese researcher, Toshiyuki Nakagaki, what did he do in 2000 that got people so excited? Well, he published a paper in nature, I believe, that showed that slime mold was capable of solving a maze. So I don't know, in newspapers, sometimes you have these little games to go from one end of a maze to another end finding the shortest possible path. And that's a complicated task to do even for a human adult.

But the slime mold was capable of doing that task in what seems like a very short amount of time for slime mold. Now, I heard about them recreating the Tokyo Railway Network. Tell us about that. Yeah, so imagine you're the mayor of New York and you're trying to redesign the subway of New York City, which, you know, is necessary, I think. You are going to face a big challenge. The challenge is you're going to have to build a network that's both usable and robust to any form of disturbance. So imagine that when the L train stops working, you need to be able to route the users through different routes. But at the same time, you want it to be cheap.

So you don't want to build too many lines, but you want enough connection between the lines so that people can go around. So that's a problem that is very complicated to solve. But Nakagaki in 2010 published this paper where he showed that Slymool is capable of finding the sweet spot, the right balance between building a network that is very robust, very capable, but at the same time relatively cheap to build.

And this paper was done by comparing the property of the network built by slime or to the property of the actual subway network in Tokyo. So I find this really impressive, although I think I find their ability to learn even more impressive. Maybe you could tell us a bit about that. Yeah, so the ability of optimizing things is something that is common to a lot of organisms. But the ability to learn is not necessarily present in, at least that we know of in all organisms on the planet. And so for a long time, it wasn't clear whether slime mold was capable of learning and was capable of encoding information and use that information for later use. And quite recently, actually, there's been a number of studies that have showed that it's capable of, for instance, anticipating events, which means that you have to learn when an event is likely to come.

But there's also other studies that show that slime mold is capable of learning that a bad stimulus is actually as no consequence. So it's a phenomenon that we call habituation. I don't know if I should explain what habituation is here. Yeah, habituation is simple things, right? Like if you had a cocktail party and then there's some annoying voice in the background or someone singing bad music, at the beginning is going to be extremely annoying to you. But as this sort of stimulus keeps being repeated, at some point you are going to abituate, your reaction to that stimulus is going to decrease over time,

allowing you to still function properly in an environment, even though there is a knowing stimuli around. And so that experiment that was done by, I'm guessing that's the French researcher you talk to, Audrey de Souture, showed that Slymold doesn't like salty environment. If it has to cross a salty environment to find food, we'll, over time, learn that it's okay to cross these dangerous, salty places in order to get access to food.

So it will habituate to this negative stimulus in order to get access to resource. Well, you're sort of winning me over. Anything else you can tell me about the great? We're making the case here. If we want to convince Ira that slime molds are charismatic, is there anything else that he should know or think about? Well, I think for me what's absolutely fascinating with that organism is, as Tanya described it, it has the consistency of snort essential.

It is bright yellow, which is not a very serious color. It doesn't smell very good. It tastes even worse. It tastes like old salad. You've tasted them? Oh, yeah, of course. You have to. If you're a biologist, you have to taste what you're working on at some point.

Well, as long as it's not going to kill you, you should probably try at least once. But, yeah, so this organism has nothing impressive. When you look at it, when you see it for the first time, it doesn't seem to be moving or doing anything. impressive. But then if you start posing problems to that organism, you see that it's capable of solving these problems in ways that are very close to the way our best algorithms are capable of solving these same problems. So for me, that's the impressive part of it, is that it's probably the least

sexy organism to look at. And at the same time, it's extremely, extremely smart, given the fact that, again, it's just a a sack of lipid and proteins that is, that is, blabbing around in the environment. There you go. Amira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios talking about slime mole with Ella Fetter. So I had a question for you. I think it was earlier this week.

Our video producer, Luke Groskin, gave me a little slime mold dehydrated to keep as my own pet. It's now the office pet. And I brought it into the studio today. It's a yellow little streak, and you fed it an oatmeal? So I started by adding a little bit of water. I didn't add enough because it dried back up. But today, added more. It got really slimy.

Can you see this? I can absolutely. Absolutely. It's grown in size since earlier in the day. It's all vainy and, yeah, slime moldy. And so we're wondering if you had any tips for, successfully raising our nuclear, unnamed, yet unnamed. And we'll take suggestions from listeners for the name as well.

Yeah, I mean, it's an organism that's actually fairly easy to grow. It likes humidity, right? If it's not humid enough, it's going to dry out. But actually, the good thing is even when it's dry, you can resuscate it. It's a complicated word for me. You can make it back, come to life with just a little bit of water. Where do you get one? do you get one from? Oh, you can get one in any of the woods around New York City or New Jersey.

You can also order it online. There's a number of companies that will ship you a kit of slime all for, I don't know, maybe 10 or 15 bucks. There you go. So it's very, very easy to get access to. And once you have it, if you find the right condition, you can grow it indefinitely, essentially. I cannot wait. So a little bit of humidity. It lacks warmer climate, so, you know. somewhere around 78, 80 degrees. It's a good temperature for it. And then a lot of oatmeal. I've given it a single flake so far.

So we're just about out of time. We've only scratched the surface for slime molds. There's a lot more. And if you want to go to science friday.com slash slime mold, you'll learn more. I think that's about it. I hope I've convinced you, Ira. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you for bringing all your guests on this show. Yeah, I wanted to thank you, Simone, for coming on. Montaigney is an associate professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and also a special thanks to Tanya Lattie from the University of Sydney. Thank you both for joining us today. And we want to ask our listeners, what do you think are slime molds charismatic? You got something even better? If you have a creature you think that would make a great contender, send us a tweet at SciFry or leave a voice memo on our Science Friday Voxpop app. And one last thing, Science Friday has been partnering with educators since 2016 to develop free,

classroom resources based on the stories you hear each week here, right here. This year is no exception, so if you know an awesome educator, or maybe you are one yourself, don't be shy, please apply for the Science Friday Educator Collaborative. You can find the application. More info at science friday.com slash educator. And we're hard at work on our big end of year show. This year we're not only recapping science from 2019, but the best moments in science from the whole decade. You know, it's going to be 2020. End of a decade. We need your help. So, go to the Science Friday

Voxpop app. Tell us what science story or discovery you remember most from the last 10 years. That's the Science Friday Vox Pop app, and you could be included in our big end of year, end of decade science wrap up. Get the Science Friday Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps, and you can have your voice on the radio. Charles Berkowitz says our director, a senior producer, Christopher and Taliatta. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Feather. Technical and engineering help from Rich Kim and Kevin Wolf. B.J. Leiderman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of the program, of course, you can subscribe to our podcasts or ask you smart speaker to play Science Friday. And of course, you can always email us,

SciFri at ScienceFridy.com. One more time, go to our, download our Science Friday, Voxpop app. Tell us what science story or discovery you remember most for the last 10 years. and we want to hear from you, leave your voice, and maybe you will be on the radio and on our podcast. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato in New York.