Science Friday - Policing And Mental Health, Ancient Clams, Moon Plan. Oct. 18, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: October 18, 2019

In the 1980s and 1990s, in the midst of rising crime rates and a nationally waning confidence in policing, law enforcement around the country adopted a different approach to addressing crime. Instead of just reacting to crime when it happened, officers decided they’d try to prevent it from happening in the first place, employing things like “hot spots” policing and “stop and frisk,” or “terry stops.” The strategy is what criminologists call proactive policing, and it’s now become widely used in police departments across the nation, especially in cities. Critics and experts debate how effective these tactics are in lowering crime rates. While there’s some evidence that proactive policing does reduce crime, now public health researchers are questioning if the practice—which sometimes results in innocent people being stopped, searched, and detained—comes with other unintended physical and mental health consequences. Samuel Walker, emeritus professor of criminology at the University of Nebraska Omaha and an expert in police accountability, reviews what led police departments to adopt a more proactive approach, while medical sociologist Alyasah Ali Sewell explains the physical and mental health impacts of stop-question-and-frisk policing. If you live near the coasts, you may occasionally enjoy a good clam bake. Thousands of years ago, indigenous people in the Pacific Northwest were much the same, with clams forming an important part of the coastal diet and culture. In fact, inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest developed techniques for cultivating clams in constructed ‘clam gardens’ along the coastline. A new study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that those clam gardens were very successful, allowing the farmed clams to sustainably grow larger and more rapidly than untended clams, despite being heavily harvested. Dana Lepofsky, a professor of archaeology at Simon Fraser University and one of the authors of that study, joins Ira to describe the technology of the clam garden and what it might be able to teach us about modern sustainable aquaculture. This week, a congressional hearing examined NASA’s plan to return humans to the moon by 2024—and some Appropriations Committee members didn’t seem particularly bullish on the idea. New York Representative José E. Serrano had this to say: Since NASA had already programmed the lunar landing mission for 2028, why does it suddenly need to speed up the clock by four years—time that is needed to carry out a successful program from a science and safety perspective. To a lot of Members, the motivation appears to be just a political one—giving President Trump a moon landing in a possible second term, should he be reelected. In this segment, Eric Berger, a senior space editor at Ars Technica, talks with Ira about the implications of that hearing. Plus, as it rushes to meet that 2024 deadline, NASA this week unveiled a new spacesuit, tailor-made for strolling on the lunar surface. Amy Ross of NASA Johnson Space Center led the suit’s design, and she joins Ira here to talk about its capabilities—and why a puffy suit is still necessary, rather than a tighter design depicted and described in films like The Martian. 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. Coming up, we'll talk about the president's plans to get human boots back on the moon by 2024, and why that deadline may be scuttled. But first, policing in America, a controversial subject, to say the least, and over the last few years, it's only become more heated as several high-profile police citizen confrontations have gone viral. But today, we're tackling a different part of that conversation. health. The idea that policing has physical and mental health consequences. Some public health researchers say, yes, it might just do that. But before we get into that, let's talk about how

policing in America, as we see it today, even came to be. How did we get here? Here to tell us more about that is our first guest, Sam Walker, Professor Emeritus in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Omaha in Nebraska. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. It's great to be here. Can you start by defining for us the term proactive policing? What does it mean to police proactively? Well, contacts between the police and citizens fall into two categories. Proactive actions are where the police initiate the contact. The other category, the majority of them, are reactive. That's where somebody calls 911 or they flag down a police car and the police react to that. And so you have written about the history of proactive police. Tell us how this sort of policing came to be.

Well, the police always did reactive policing, excuse me, proactive policing, where they would initiate some kind of contact. But I think there was a real shift in the late 70s and 1980s, where because of developments in technology and criminology and our understanding of crime and disorder, today's proactive policing programs, a lot of which are referred to as smart police services,

smart policing are really much better, much more scientific than the old style. What do you mean by that? Scientific. They are data driven. And so one of the most popular of the proactive programs is called hotspots. There was this one study. It started out as a small study in Minneapolis. And they discovered that when you analyzed all the 911 calls coming into the Minneapolis Police Department,

5% of the locations in the city accounted for over half of all the police contacts, all of their actions. And so hotspots represents the idea that, you know, crime and disorder is really concentrated in certain geographic areas. And so it logically follows if you really want to deal effectively with crime and disorder, you concentrate police efforts in those areas. And so this is really smart policing. You know, back in the old days, let's say the old days like the 1960s, there would be a bunch of robberies or something in a neighborhood, and the police would just flood the area with more patrol cars. That's, let's politely call it not smart policing. We could call it some other things, but it's basically, it's not driven by any plan, any data, any strategic objectives. That sounds like the old days where we had the cop on the beat would be walking around, getting to know everybody.

Well, the cop on the beat is shrouded in mythology and this idea that, you know, back in the late 19th century, for example, you know, the cop on the beat knew everybody there, not true. There's no evidence to support that. That's part of this myth making of once upon time there was a golden age that was better than the way things are today. Not true. So what you're saying is once we brought some science into it and we can analyze the data, we can get a better idea of where the crime was happening. Right. Well, the science told us where it is, where these bad events are occurring. Then it fell to police departments working with this whole new generation of criminologists to figure out, to develop some strategies for effectively dealing with that crime and disorder. And did those strategies work? Some are more effective than others. Most of them, there's very low. limited evidence about effectiveness. You mentioned the history of proactive policing that I did.

That was a special report commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences, which had a panel. This is their standard operating procedure. And they reviewed all of the evidence on proactive policing. So I was not a member of that panel. They just commissioned me separately to do this paper on the history of proactive policing. And what did that show the panel or the conclusions? Well, there are some programs which there is some good evidence that they work, but most of them there's mixed evidence at best or weak evidence or just no evidence at all. And one of the most important finding which they stress, you know, very strongly in the report is if you do too much proactive policing in particular neighborhoods or neighborhoods where particular communities, African-American community lives, Hispanic community lives,

You can do a lot of damage. You can result in unconstitutional policing of excessive stops and frisks and arrests. So there's some real problems built into proactive policing. I want to bring on another conversation, bring on another guest. Alia Ali Sewell is a associate professor of sociology at Emory University. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for inviting me. You're welcome.

You've done some research on the health impacts of stop and frisk, a proactive policing tactic that was the focus of much media attention and activism here in New York. First, tell us what exactly is stop and frisk? So stop and frisk refers to a criminal surveillance program where people can be stopped on the street because they appear to be a suspect or they appear to be doing something that is wrong. and we'll get into the nitty-gritty of your research after the break, but in the big picture sense, what has your research revealed about how this sort of policing impacts health? My research has shown that policing sick in society, proactive perseverance, etches ailment into our neighborhoods and embeds illness into the body. And you actually went out and studied the statistics on these societies?

Yes, most of the work, actually all the, the work that has been published is focused on New York City, which is where we have the best data. And we're using, me and a couple of colleagues are using pretty advanced statistics to bowl down and pull apart the ways in which society matters not just for the individual, but also matters for the context in which the individual is located. And were you surprised by these results? Honestly, I was. My work, before I started doing work on policing, my work really focused on housing, redlining.

And in that literature, we all know that where you live matters. We know it matters for your health and for other types of social outcomes. But when I started to do to work on policing, I stopped pushing frisk in particular in New York City, I found that the effects of policing were far more robust than anything I'd ever seen before. So I was very surprised. I want to bring in someone who has firsthand knowledge about this. Our producer, Danya Abdul-Hamid, caught up with a young man named Cassiam Walters to talk with him about his experiences with Stop and Frisk. He is a 24-year-old Brooklynite, and the first time he was stopped, he thinks he was about seven, but it would happen again and again many times after

that. I'm going to say roughly like a dozen, a dozen times. And that was like when I started accounting. I had a really bad experience in high school. I was a high school senior, so about 17 maybe. I was waiting for my friend. He was deaf, so I was kind of like trying to like get him integrated into the community. I was waiting for him outside of his house and they came up to me. They're like, hey, you know, we're truancy cops and truancy cops who are their sole purpose is to kind of like stop kids from like cutting school. So I guess they thought I was cutting school and I was like, no, I'm just waiting for my friend. You know, we don't have a, we don't have a zero period or a first period. restart second period.

And he was like, you know, like, we're not that done. We weren't born yesterday. And he kind of, like, turned me around really roughly. There was nobody else on the block, so, like, no one was able to, like, witness what was going on. And just, like, manhandled me. I'm, like, a little kid at the time, you know, I'm not really built at that age. I'm super scrawny.

And, like, like, really turned me around, rough me up. Emptied my bags. I went through my things, my belongings. Just, like, throw it all on the floor. And they're like, where is it? They're like, where is it? We know you have someone on you. And they're like, everyone does it.

You know, you think you're cool. You cut school to do it. And I'm like, I still don't. I can't connect again. And they were like, okay, well, then you're going to put this back in your bag. And then we'll just get you another time. You got away this time. You know, when I see a cop now, again, it's not the same fair I had when I was younger.

But no matter what, like, and people can say like, oh, yeah, I know my rides. I'm going to stand up to them at the end of the day. And every single person, especially a black male, there's always a PTSD moment. even if you haven't had stop and frisk, you know the culture. Like, what do I do when I walk by? You shouldn't have to feel like that. As a black male, I've never had to think so much about the passing of someone more than I have with a New York City cop. Or with a cop in general.

You know, I think the fear comes from the thought of what could happen if you do this. If I walk home the right way, what could happen? If I pass this precinct, what could happen? If I wear this hoodie today, what can happen? If I wear these certain colors, like you shouldn't have to, as a young African-American male say, okay, what colors am I allowed to wear? that sounds crazy. You know, it wasn't until I got out of high school when I was like, this is crazy, and like, that's really how I was. And, you know, I didn't have the, again, I didn't have the guidance around me to say, no, like, you can do this, you can do that.

So I just settled, and I settled, and I settled, and I settled. And I think that's another effect on the mind, and it's an effect on your self-esteem, you know, what that can do to a person. It breaks down, just your confidence, your social skills. It does so much, because I saw it, you know, spelling into other areas of my life. Mm-hmm. That was Kasim Walters, a 23-year-old Brooklynite. And this is not uncommon, Sam Walker. Are you guys someone who studies this, these kinds of confrontations? Yes. Actually, I should add here, I was an expert witness in the court case that declared the New York City policy unconstitutional.

So I had sort of an inside look. I got to see all the policies and procedures and data. And the New York City policy was not smart policing. It was stupid policing. It was also unlawful. and unconstitutional. And the story we just heard is it was repeated, you know, hundreds of thousands of times. But to talk about the health consequences, a proactive policing where the police initiate that contact, well, for all people, you know, that that's an unpleasant and uncomfortable, stressful situation. Now, if it's repeated many times, that just jacks up the level of stress and the mental health consequences and the physical consequences. And so, you know, policing that is unconstitutional, as we've just heard described,

is also very unhealthy policing for the victims of those stops. That's what I want to get into after our break. So I want to just take a break now. We'll try to go dissect that, the unhealthy aspects of it for not just the people involved, but the unhealthy aspects about the whole community, how it spills over. As he said, it spilled over into all his, all-his- aspects of life. We'll talk about it after the break. If you have something you'd like to comment, please, 844724-8255. You can also tweet us at Cy Fry. Stay with us. We'll be right back after

this break. You're listening to Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking this hour about proactive policing, including stopping and frisking people and what mental and social effects it may have. And now there is real science that has been done to actually figure out how that is happening. My guest are Aliasha Ali Sewell, Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University. Sam Walker, Professor Emeritus in a School of Criminology and Criminal Justice University of Omaha. Aliasa, let me get into this a little bit about the science. What sort of physical and mental problems are you seeing in connection with stop and frisk? So they run the gamut. The gamut includes physical health problems like believing that your health

is poor or fair, having a diagnosis of diabetes, having a diagnosis of high blood pressure, even having asthma episode within the past year, and obesity. It's linked to higher levels of obesity. And is this affecting people of all ages, of where they live? And what is the demographics have this? Well, the first couple of studies I did, they looked at all ages, everybody over at 18. So there is work on how policing affects youth, primarily thinking about the direct effects of it. So if you are personally stopped, the extent to which that is going to be linked to higher levels,

primarily of mental health problems, of psychological distress. But in my studies, I use adults going up to the age of 95. Wow. And you're saying now you can, because of the studies, draw a direct line between the policing practices and the health of the people. And particularly the policing practices that are happening within a context within the neighborhood. So the primary, the strongest relationship is linked to absolute levels of use of force and physical and mental health problems. This includes all the ones I just mentioned to you as well as psychological distress. There's also increases of mental health problems among neighborhoods and neighborhoods where people are having force use against them.

and there's also higher levels of physical health problems in neighborhoods where there are large racial disparities. This is referring to the relative rate of use of force against minorities compared to their white counterparts. Does this affect men and women the same way? It actually doesn't. And most of the research that looks at this focuses on male population. So until the study that I did, which came out in social science and medicine, actually compared men and women living in the same neighborhood, the extent to which they experience psychological distress, you really didn't know that the burden is, at least with regards to psychological stress, is stronger among men.

What about the difference between relative and absolute use of force? So there's a lot of evidence that suggests that the overall rate of use of force and frisking, and this is different than just being stopped. Now, being stopped itself is linked to higher levels of poor health among Latinos and higher levels of high blood pressure among both blacks and Asian Pacific Islanders. But you also find that it's linked to things such as racial disparities and in the stop. That's also linked to physical health problems primarily. But the absolute measures that I use, which are basically higher levels of frisking, higher levels of use of force, they've been linked to both physical and mental health problems.

They've been found to experience higher levels of illness if you're predominantly in a black or Latino neighborhood, primarily if you're male. And in the case of high blood pressure, which is a really interesting case, Latinos and Asians actually have higher rates of high blood pressure if they live in neighborhoods where there's large uses of force among the pedestrians. You know, this almost seems intuitive, does it not, that people would suffer from feeling targeted on the street? I guess what you're doing is actually scientifically investigating and putting data behind those feelings. Well, that is true. And just to be clear, I don't necessarily study whether you yourself are stopped and then whether you yourself have illness problems. I examine the environment, the policing environment, the types of practices that are happening to pedestrians after the stop occurs. If in areas where the stop is more likely to result in frisking, particularly and use of force, you're seeing higher levels of physical health and mental health problems.

What are some of the- Independent of whether you personally are stopped. Sam Walker, have police departments started to change their procedures in light of the- this new research? Actually, all of the protest that followed Ferguson five years ago, five years in a couple months, the national protests and all of the other incidents in Baltimore, Cleveland, and around the country have had an important positive effect. I'm actually giving a paper on this in November.

There's been an extraordinary outburst of reform. Now, the problem, in several different areas of life, state legislatures have passed, you know, numerous laws, number city councils have passed, new procedures for holding the police accountable. There is one group of police chiefs, police executive research forum, which is far more progressive than the main group, the IACP, and they've been doing some tremendous things. So there is a lot happening. There's cause for optimism. The problem is the national news media focuses on the bad news. You know, the evening news, it's the shooting, it's the beating and so on. And so the conventional wisdom among most people is that, well, gee, nothing's happened since Ferguson.

Actually, a lot has, and there's a lot of cause for some cautious optimism about that. Let's go to the phones, 844-8255. Orlando, Audrey, in Orlando. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thank you for having me. Go ahead. My question was, I'm a master's in criminal justice student while I just drafted. graduated. And one of my questions was, could there be an argument made, because I had one professor that made this argument, that minorities are primarily stopped due to crime mapping and the, not so much as their ethnic makeup, but the neighborhoods that they live in and the crime that takes place there. Can the argument actually be made or is their data that prove otherwise?

Okay, let's get an answer. I'll ask us or Sam. Yeah, I think my work speaks directly to that because in all, All of the analysis that I do, I actually adjust for the crime levels of the neighborhood. So we actually get data from New York Police Department on whether people are calling in about robbery complaints or homicides or so on and so forth. And we actually are able to wipe away the variation in health that is due to specifically due to crime. We're also able to wipe away the relationship between policing and health that is linked to crime. So the numbers that I mentioned to you before, you know, something between, you know, a nine or more percent increase in physical health problems, physical mental health problems in neighborhoods where there's large levels of frisking and use of force, that is independent of the crime of those neighborhoods. Is it, do people who feel like they have mental problems, can they go get help for this as a legitimate reason for feeling that way? I mean, I think that's where we're moving towards.

I think one of the key things that my work has been doing is establishing a public health relationship that suggests that in fact policing itself is an epidemic. So it's creating an epidemic of assaults. It's creating an epidemic of illness. And it's a type of epidemic that's not going to go away just because we're starting to delegalize, stop and frisk. That effect is going to stay in the body because the types of illnesses that form when someone is, when they stop and they're under a climate of fear, those things get encoded into the body,

get embedded further and deeper into ourselves. Sam Walker, what do you think about this? Well, you mentioned crime mapping. Hot spots policing, which is the most successful program, most widely used program, is a form of mapping. You're identifying those parts of town where there you have the highest rates of crime and disorder. Well, the fact of the matter is those are low-income neighborhoods. and they are primarily in neighborhoods of people of color. And so this highly respected program hotspots,

it has this aura of science about it. Wow, it's driven by data. Now, this is really good stuff. Well, you're concentrating, you know, police, whether there are stops, risks, and other things on a particular segment of the population. And the primary targets are young black men. And that's confirmed by every bit of good data that we have.

And so I think we're just beginning to get the point of thinking that, wait a minute, we need to rethink, you know, these kind of scientifically data-driven programs because of their impact on a particular part of our community. Ali, what do you think about that? You know, I think that the case I want to talk to you about is high blood pressure. High blood pressure is one moment within the life cycle where the way you respond to stress changes. And what I've found is that when you talk about the relative use of force, the most palpable associations with illness is in regards to high blood pressure. So in areas where minorities are more likely to have force use against them and more likely to be frisked, there's higher levels of high blood pressure.

But I also want you to understand that it's not just minority areas or minority people. So there's a paper that came out in sociological forum, which suggested that, in predominantly white neighborhoods where black and brown pedestrians were targeted for use of force, you see higher levels of physical health problems, cardiovascular disease, metabolic issues, regards to obesity in those neighborhoods, then comparable white neighborhoods where black, brown, and white pedestrians are treated the same. Wow. Great discussion.

We're going to have to end it there. I'd like to thank my guests, Aliasa Ali Suu, Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University, Sam Walker, Professor Emeritus in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice University of Omaha in Nebraska. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Earlier this week, the House Appropriations Committee held a hearing on our collective space future. Under discussion was the Trump administration's goal to get human boots back on the moon by 2024, a full four years faster than the previous deadline of 2008. And let's just say some of the committee members, including New York Representative Jose Serrano,

didn't seem particularly enthusiastic about the plan. Since NASA has already programmed the lunar landing mission for 2028, why does it suddenly need to speed up the clock by four years, time that is needed to carry out a successful program from a science and safety perspective? To a lot of members, the motivation appears to be just a political one. Giving President Trump a moon landing and a possible second term should he be reelected. That was Representative Jose Serrano of New York. Joining me now with more on this budgetary spad is Eric Berger, senior space editor at Ars Technica. He joins us from Houston Public Radio. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you very much, Ira. You're welcome. Eric unpack what

happened at this hearing for us. Right. So every year during the budgetary process, both the House and the Senate appropriation subcommittees for NASA sort of have hearings to discuss what NASA is going to do with their budget. This year, the House already did that, the House subcommittee already did that, but then NASA came back and said, well, we've got this Artemis program, and as part of this, you know, plan to land humans on the moon in 2024, you know, to bring that forward four years, we're going to need more money. Now, this year, you know, we only need $1.6 billion. And so that was a supplementary budget. requests. And so, you know, other things have other things have been happening in Washington

this year. But they finally sort of brought the administrator back before the committee this week to discuss it. And needless to say, Jose Serrano, who you heard from there, was quite skeptical about sort of the technical merits of the 2024 date. He said the launch timeline was a political one, right? A nice way for President Trump to cap off his second term. Should he be reelected? Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, NASA started in an age of politics. politics, isn't it? You know, the whole... The Apollo mission. Yeah, absolutely. NASA has always been a political program. It certainly has great technical achievements, but its policies are set by the White

House and it's funded by Congress, so it is necessarily a political creature. You know, whether this date truly was a political date, 2024, is certainly open for debate. I think the administrator is right when he talks about NASA needs a sense of urgency. You know, a goal of landing humans a decade from now is is really quite a long time. And so, you know, will we really stick to that goal or will it continue to slip? So there were some good reasons to bring the date forward. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

Talking about NASA in Space with Eric Berger from Ars Technica. President Trump wanted to peel money away from the Pell Grant Program, which gives money to low-income students to attend college and put that money into the NASA budget instead. I'm betting that was not a popular move. That was really a critical mistake, and the question is whether that was an unforced error or whether that was deliberately done. As you know, the politics get pretty complicated in Washington, D.C., but there are certainly elements of the White House's Office of Management Budget. They set the national budget for the White House, and they were not particularly keen on taking on a new program, which, although it was only going to cost $1.6 billion in the coming fiscal year,

that clearly was going to balloon, you know, in coming years to maybe $6 to $8 billion additionally, you know, per budget. And so there was a real, there was some thought that maybe they found the extra money this year in the Pell Grants to kind of be a poison pill. Well, is there anywhere else the money could come from? Is there a deal that could be made? So Jose Serrano, the New York representative, offered such a deal to Bridenstein, who admittedly does not have the power to make these kinds of budgetary deals. But he basically said, look, we would be having a very different conversation today if the president came forward and said, well, this year instead of using the money for the wall, I'd like to use it to accelerate the moon program. I think that instead of having something divisive like the wall, having something unifying like a major space program, you know, goal would be a good thing. But obviously, that's unlikely to happen.

Has the president tweeted anything about this whole? Well, he has not tweeted, but today he did call up to the International Space Station because for the first time, two women astronauts were outside conducting a spacewalk. And so in the middle of the EVA, he was sitting in the White House next to Ivanka and the vice president, and he called up. And all he really said related to this was that, look, we're going to the moon and then we're going to launch from the moon and go to Mars, which is kind of an interesting statement. So he sort of didn't wait into this problem, but this idea is not going away, this spat

about the money. No, it's not. And what is probably going to happen is they're not going to get all the funding they need this year. And so instead of being able to start on construction of lunar landers, because really the big technical piece here is you need something to take a crew safely down from lunar orbit to the surface, allow them to live on the surface of the moon, and then safely blast off back up to the moon. And that system, it all has to work or they die. And so it's really a big technical problem. And to make the 20-24 date, they really had to start building those by the end of this year. year.

Oh, that has not happened. Stay with us, Eric, okay? We're going to take a break and come back and talk about not only getting to the moon, but what the well-dressed astronaut might wear on the moon because a new space suit design was revealed this week, and it looks a lot puffier. Remember that's stay-puffed marshmallow in the movie? A little bit looks like that. We'll talk about it.

Eric will be back. We'll also bring on Amy Ross, who led the team that designed the suit. the exploration, extravehicular mobility unit. NASA loves these acronyms. XEMU. We'll talk about it after the break. Our number 844-8255 if you'd like to comment. Stay with us.

We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking about NASA's next moonshot, whether it'll happen in 2024 as the Trump administration has moved up that date, or in 2028, which some members of Congress are holding fast, too. Still with me is Eric Berger, a senior space editor at Ars Technica. And, you know, when we land on the moon, of course, we're going to need the proper outfits. You can't just

pull on those old Apollo spacesuits out of the closet, get them on. No, designers and engineers have been hard at work, and they unveiled a prototype of the next moon suit this week. We have pictures up on ScienceFriiday.com slash spacesuit. Amy Ross led the team that designed the suit, which is formerly called the Exploration, Extravehicular Mobility, unit or the XEMU pressure garment. Amy Ross is based at Johnson's Space Center in Houston. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you very much for having me here. I hope you didn't take offense of me comparing it to the State Puff Marshboro Man. It's just a joke. It's not really that. But it is a little bit. We hear that a lot. Why do people think it looks like that? It is kind of

baggier or puffier, isn't it, than the old Apollo suit? Actually, it's on the based on the same idea, it's an inflated balloon around a human. And especially when you start getting smaller subjects in there and they start to get as wide as they are tall, then it looks a little bulky. So why is it differently, designed differently than the ones that went up to the moon in Apollo? Well, the Apollo suit had to do multiple jobs throughout the mission. They only had room and mass capability for one suit. And so it was a crew survival suit, which you saw in the video from what you saw in the presentation from NASA on Tuesday, the orange suit, which is very different from an extravehicular activity suit, which is what my suit is.

And so when you get to specialize, you can be much more capable in the function you're supposed to perform. And so we were able to build in a lot more mobility into the suit using bearings than they were able to do during Apollo. Eric, what are your thoughts on the new spacesuit? Well, you know, I really have deep appreciation for what NASA is trying to do in building a space suit. And think about someone, you know, like Amy, who is in charge of designing spacesuits. The problem for her and for NASA is that the mission keeps changing. So a decade ago, you know, it was to go to the surface of the moon and then it changed and it was to visit an asteroid. So that's a very different space suit in terms of going to lunar.

surface and then sort of doing an EVA out of a ship and sort of hopping over to an asteroid. And then the mission was to go to Mars. And now the mission is to go to the moon and then to Mars. And so these are all kind of very, very different designs for this to space suit. And so I think, you know, I think this is probably a perfectly capable space suit for the moon. The question is, you know, if we change our direction again to go to Mars, will it have to be all redesigned again? Amy, do you think you're going to be rushed at all by this 2024 timeline that the president wants now?

Well, we've been working in this direction for a long time, and we've always kind of had our eyes further out working on a Mars suit. And so to meet a 2024 timeline, you know, it's always, once you actually have to build flight hardware, it's always a little intense. But we believe we can make that timeline. Yeah, we do. What do you think the biggest, if I were coming in for a try-on, what's the biggest selling point of your new suit? Well, what we've been doing is working with scientists, folks like geologists who are going to go understand where the moon came from, what's there now, what the resources are, and made sure that they could do the job they want to do in our hardware. Because the suit is just a tool for the astronauts, and so it should just be another means of them getting their job done. Is it going to have the same kind of fittings? We used to watch the astronauts takes off their gloves, and it had a lock into place and things like that.

will have those fittings? Are they going to be more soft-like? No, in general, when you have those disconnects, they tend to be metal components. Some of them are shockingly similar to what we used in Apollo, and some of them are new, based on new requirements. And how much easier will they be to get in or out of? Well, so right now we say it's easier. But, you know, as you use a thing, you start to understand what more and more of the problems are. So as we go forward in our testing this coming year and then certification following that, we'll learn more of the problems. But so far we've been testing these rare entry suits for most of my career, 20 plus years.

And we think that they are. I find them to be pretty easy to dawn and to off, take on and off. So considering that we're thinking about building a moon base and working on the moon, and this suit will be more or less for working terrestrily, walking around on the moon. Yes, but it's also capable of doing. microgravity EBAs. We've done testing in our Neutrobiency Laboratory, our giant swimming pool, and they're good at doing that too. Eric, there's news that Japan is teaming up with us to help build a moon base in some capacity. Is that true?

Yes. Japan has been a very close ally to NASA in its human exploration efforts. And the administrator, Jim Bridenstein, went there earlier this fall basically for almost a week and visited their facilities. And just today, I think the Prime Minister of Japan sort of signed off on the country's participation, both in the Lunar Gateway, which is the plan to sort of have a space station at the moon from which to go down to the surface of the moon and then sort of participate in lunar EVAs. And this is a good, this is a pretty good thing for NASA because they certainly need international partners if they are to carry this forward. It helps sort of build the political will to stick to these kinds of programs.

Amy, do we know how close you are to coming up with a final design? I understand it's not going to be the colorful one that you showed off because it needs to be white to reflect the sunlight and the heat. And who you're partnering with? Isn't it true that Platex made the original spacesuits that were you? Made the work they built the Apollo spacesuits, but you know, we've had various companies and contractors that we've worked with through the years. And in this case, we believe that the suit will be done. The design will be set next year. And then it's just a matter of building them and qualifying them for spaceflight.

All right. Thank you both for taking time to be with us. We'll wait to see it. Amy Ross led the team that designs the new moon suit, otherwise known as the EEMU, at the Johnson Space Center, or you can turn that around to be the XEEMU. Eric Berger, Senior Space Editor at Aris Technica,

We had a link to Eric's article about NASA's budgetary battles, and we have photos of the moon suit there up at Science Friday.com slash spacesuit. If you live on or near the coast, you may have a real nice clam bake every now and then. And you know what? Thousands of years ago, indigenous peoples on this continent were the same way. Clams were an important part of the coastal diet and culture. In fact, inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest developed techniques for essential. farming clams and constructed clam gardens.

Dana Lipovsky is one of the authors of a study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. On the success of those clam growing techniques, she's a professor of archaeology at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. So tell us about these colonies. What did you know about them?

Oh, goodness. Yes. Well, we knew from the elders, the indigenous elders of this region, that they used to cultivate clams in something called, well, that we call clam gardens, but they had traditional names, depending on the indigenous group like Lojeeway, which means to roll rocks from the Kwokkwala language. And basically, these are features that we now know were developed some 3 to 4,000 years ago, that when indigenous people would roll the rocks at the lowest intertidal from the sloped beach down to the water edge to create a rock wall. And in doing so, when the tides came in, they brought sands and gravels and made not, they filled in that rock wall to make a flat terrace. So if there any gardeners are out there, you can understand why that would be really great,

created this flat terrace where there was a sloped beach before. But why it's so ingenious is because in the intertidal there are zones where different critters flourish. And there is a particular zone in the beach, as you're walking down the beach, where butter clams and little necks flourish, these two species that were so important to indigenous food systems. And by building this terrace and flattening out that slope, you've basically expanded the zone at a particular tidal height where these clams do the best. So you've increased the habitat, the zone where those clams can really flourish.

So you've really expanded your food source. Well, that was sort of clam scientists then? Very much. I mean, indigenous peoples worldwide are scientists or scientists or scientists because their knowledge developed over thousands of years of observing how the world worked and doing trial and error of kind of different kinds of things. and then passing that knowledge on intergenerational. So definitely scientists.

And so they actually sculpted the ground, knowing how to best raise the clams, shaping the garden, as you say, and getting the best production they could out of the clams. That's right. And what's really neat about clam gardens, or Lohi Way or with Hwatham, is that not only did people put them on already existing beaches that had kind of a mediocre, natural abundance of clams,

They also built these rock walls on bedrock shelves. And then through time when they filled in with sediment with sands and gravels, beaches were created where there was none before. So they created gardens where there was bedrock, thereby multiplying the food stores in a sustainable way over incredible numbers over what was available naturally. But the people did stop farming them, right? They stopped using the farming technique. Why? What happened?

Yeah, that's right. So we actually have a sequence of study that takes us from post-glacial times 11,500 years ago to current times. And what we see is basically right around the late 1700s, early 1800s, people stop farming in an intensive way, these clams. And that's because the indigenous population plummet as a result of introduced European diseases. So a lot of that knowledge and that daily practice gets lost. Although today there's a huge, huge effort among indigenous peoples up and down the coast, from Alaska to Washington, to actually reinstate these clam gardens, and then doing so reconnect with that cultural tradition.

Is there a way of rediscovering how they did what they did? Yeah, and that's basically what we do as archaeologists, is we listen to indigenous peoples and hear what they have to tell us, and they have a lot to offer to the discussion. And then we combine that with Western scientific techniques, which in our case is archaeology and paleoecology. We dig in the ground. We measured clams over the 11,000-year period.

Basically, we measured the growth rings and ask, how fast did they grow, how big did they grow, how when did they die, that kind of thing. And we can track through time, through these interactions with people, how well did clams do? And what we find is that the clams just after the glacial age, when beaches are really depopurate,

there's not much gravel and sand and not much microorganisms on them, that those clams are growing very slowly, very poorly, and dying young. And they look the most similar to the clams today. And in between, when people were managing them

and harvesting them intensively and passing on that indigenous knowledge, clams were thriving. So there was a golden age of clams some time ago. Yeah, just a couple hundred years ago. For everybody who likes clams, they wish they were back then. Yeah. Well, I want to thank you very much for taking time to talk to. Is there anything else that you need to study on this? Oh, goodness, yes. So we know that in our region people developed and really fine-tuned this technology around 3,000,000 years ago. But now we want to ask, and we're starting to ask,

what was the relationship between that and population numbers and climate change and various other kind of ecological changes? Because, of course, in this dramatic time that we live in today of changes environmentally brought on by changing climate, we need to know how these traditional techniques can help us into the future. So we're finding when we do experiments today that these clam gardens are, even though they hadn't been worked and tended, even today, they're way more productive, many, many times more productive than the beaches without these clam gardens.

So what can we learn about that in this time where clams are actually suffering because with ocean acidification, they're having trouble putting on their shells? Clam gardens are very rich in calcium carbonates because of broken up barnacle shells. So what can we learn from that? What can indigenous peoples tell us, either by talking to them and listening carefully or combining that with Western science, that can bring us forward into this next age that we're facing? Do you think there are indigenous peoples in other parts of the world that raised clams the same way? There are indigenous peoples in other parts of the world for whom clams are really important and who cultivated clams, but not exactly in this way. So what's neat about clam gardens is that even naysayers can't deny the fact that they are traditional management techniques.

There has been a whole kind of wave of scientists who believe that indigenous peoples didn't really manage their environment for the long term. Because these rock walls persist, they can't deny it. But there are other kind of techniques that were used globally, like cultivating, killing the soil and size selection, and determining what time of year you can harvest and when you can't, what species you can harvest. That's worldwide. It's just harder to track in the archaeological record, but there is no doubt in my mind that, you know,

Tokyo Bay was full of large archaeological sites with meters of high of shells. Clams are that important all over the world and for millennia. And that they sustained people over that time, despite the fact that people were harvesting them intensively and that populations were very dense in the past really reflects the fact that there was traditional management techniques. And I think we just need to stop long enough to talk to indigenous peoples around the world

and ask them, how should we do this? There's something to be learned there. That's a great lesson. Wow. We have hubris about how well we do things. We can learn stuff that's hundreds of years old. Absolutely. Yeah, thank you very much for taking time to talk with us, Dr. Lopopovsky.

My pleasure. Take care. Dana Lopovsky is Professor of Archaeology at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. One last thing before we go to our listeners in the San Francisco Bay Area. We're coming to town Saturday, November 16th for a special night of science conversations, live music and entertainment, talking about environmental justice, artificial intelligence, and yes, the tiny arachnids living on your face. That's what I said. Don't miss out.

More info at ScienceFriday.com slash San Francisco. That is Saturday night, November 16th. Set your date, science friday.com slash San Francisco. We have technical engineering help today from Rich Kim, Kevin Wolf, B.J. Lienerman, composed our theme music. And we want you to download the Science Friday Vox Pop app because we're asking you which cold and flu season right around the corner resuming in on a sticky subject. Mewcus. not snot it is snot science we're talking about

let us know your questions about this ubiquitous substance on the Science Friday Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps download the Science Friday Voxpop app we want to know about mucus a snot science what do you want to know about it download the app and ask us a question about mucus

you'll find that it's all over your body it's everywhere it's kind of yucky but kind of interesting to talk about So download the app and talk about mucus. I'm Ira Flato in New York. Have a great weekend.