Science Friday - Radioactive Wildlife, Bus Stop Heat, Football Jersey Numbers. Sept 15, 2023, Part 1

Episode Date: September 15, 2023

Astronomers Find Exoplanet That May Be Covered In WaterScientists using the James Webb Space Telescope made an exciting discovery this week: Exoplanet K2-18 b, 120 light years away from our solar system, could be covered by a water ocean, similar to Earth. Astronomers say this could be a big leap in our exploration of life on other planets.This news comes amid another JWST discovery: The earliest black holes seem to be much larger than black holes today. This news also provides evidence that black holes can form without stars, a theorized phenomenon that has never been directly observed.Joining Ira to talk about these and other science stories of the week is Tim Revell, Deputy U.S. Editor of New Scientist, based in New York, New York. What Radioactive Animals Teach Us About Nuclear FalloutWhen you hear the words “radioactive wildlife,” your brain probably jumps to Chernobyl’s wolves, which—despite the odds—are still thriving at the site of the nuclear disaster. Or maybe you’ve heard of the rat snakes in Fukushima that pick up radioactive contamination as they slither around.Well, it’s time to add two more to that list of radioactive critters: turtles and wild boar. They’re the subjects of two new studies that looked at radioactivity in wildlife and mapped out where it came from. Ira talks with Dr. Cyler Conrad, archaeologist at Pacific Northwest National Lab in Richland, Washington who worked on the turtle study, and Dr. Georg Steinhauser, professor of applied radiochemistry at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria, who studied boar. They chat about the two studies, how wildlife can clue us into radioactive contamination, and what we can learn from critters in nuclear fallout zones. Waiting for the Bus in Houston is Hot. And Dangerous.It was a hot summer day and Glory Medina and her daughter Jade, who was 3 at the time, were running a quick errand at the grocery store near their apartment in Gulfton. They had taken the bus and once they arrived, the two of them faced a giant unshaded parking lot, the black asphalt radiating heat into their faces as they walked across it.The blast of AC felt cool as they entered the store, and Medina bent down to lift her daughter into the grocery cart. That’s when she noticed Jade’s face was red, almost purple.“I got scared,” Medina said in Spanish, remembering that day four years ago.Read more at sciencefriday.com. The Psychology Behind Wide Receivers’ Jersey NumbersFootball season is officially here, with the NFL’s first game kicking off last Sunday. And if you’ve been watching the sport for a long time, you may have noticed some changes: better-padded helmets meant to reduce serious brain injury, new “sticky” gloves that make it easier for players to hold the ball, and lighter-weight jerseys that make it harder for other players to grab onto. But you’ll also notice the numbers on those jerseys are different, too.For most of the NFL’s history, wide receivers could only pick jersey numbers between 80 and 89. But in 2004, the league relaxed this policy, allowing players to also pick numbers between 10 and 19. Many players preferred these smaller values explaining that the 1 looked slimmer than the 8, and made them feel thinner and faster. As of 2019, 80% of wide receivers made the switch.But is there an actual association between smaller numbers and perception of body size?To investigate whether this was fact or superstition, Dr. Ladan Shams, professor of psychology, bioengineering, and neuroscience at UCLA, ran a study that found those wide receivers were onto something: the results suggest there is a correlation between smaller numbers and perceived body size. Her team’s research was published in PLOS One. She joins Ira to talk about the study and what it could tell us about implicit bias. To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flito. Later in the hour, what we can learn from radioactive wildlife and the struggle of keeping cool while waiting for public transit. But first, scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope have made an exciting discovery exoplanet K-218B, 120 light years away from our solar system, could be covered by a water ocean, and it shows evidence of possible life. Scientists say this could be a big leap in our exploration of life outside of our planet. And joining me to talk about this story and other science news of the week is my guest, Tim Revel, deputy U.S. editor for a new scientist and host of the New Scientist Weekly Podcast. He's based in New York. Welcome back, Tim. Hello, thanks for having me. You're welcome. This sounds pretty exciting. What makes it so special?

Yeah, there's been a lot of excitement about this one this week. And a lot of that has come from a tentative sign of this molecule called dimethyl sulfide or DMS that's been spotted in the planet's atmosphere. And the thing about DMS is that it's only produced by life on Earth anyway, and that's mostly by phytoplankton. So that could mean that it's a sign of life on K2-18B2, but it's worth saying that it's still just a tentative sign. So we need to do a bit more analysis to really confirm that it is actually present there. And then, of course, it's also possible that though we currently only know a way for life to produce this molecule. It's possible that there's a chemical process that we don't know of that could also produce it. What else would they look for to see if there

are signs of life? So they typically, they look for molecules that can only be produced by life in various different forms. That would be like a real cast iron evidence that there is life on an exoplanet. But they also look for things that we know on Earth is what makes Earth pretty habitable. So there's this zone around a star called a habitable region or a habitable zone. And that's where a planet is far enough away from its star that it's not too hot, but they're also close enough that it's not too cold. And the idea being that you want to have the temperature conditions just right so that liquid water could exist on the planet. And that's what they found with K218B, that it's actually in this habitable zone. And then they've also found some extra indicators that there could be liquid oceans there.

and that's the presence of methane and carbon dioxide in its atmosphere. And those astronomers say really are good indicators that it would have water oceans. Aha, that's terrific. The JWST has been pretty busy. It has found supermassive black holes from a long time ago. Tell us why that's important. Yeah, these are very interesting. So one of the things that we're really hoping JWST would be able to do is spot some of the universe's earliest black holes,

which we couldn't see with any of the other telescopes that are currently in existence. And it's been able to do that. It's spotted 20 extremely old supermassive black holes. And it found out that they appeared to be sort of misbehaving based on what we imagine black holes should be doing across the universe. Because very similar black holes that are a little bit younger, compared to newer black holes, these older black holes seem to be sort of the wrong size. So they're between 10 to 100 times too big relative to the other objects in their nearby galaxy. And so one way of viewing it is that the black holes where they're a little bit too big,

but another way of viewing it is that the galaxies that they inhabit are a bit too small. But either way, astronomers are saying something strange is going on. So what are the implications of early black holes being so huge? Yeah. So one, we don't know why they would be this big yet. But one possibility is that what we're actually observing is a, a completely different type of black hole than we've ever seen before. And that's called a direct collapse black hole. Normally, every black hole that we've observed before, well, they form

from collapsed stars when stars get to the end of their life. They become black holes. Some of them do. But what could have happened in the very early universe is there was enough hydrogen and helium gas flowing about that it could come together and go straight into forming a black hole. And so there needs to be a little bit further analysis to work out whether that's what JWST is seeing. But so far, this is the strongest evidence yet of us seeing such a black hole. Let's move back here to Earth for the historic, dangerous flooding in Libya. Just how intense has this flooding been? Yeah, it's been really catastrophic. So thousands of people have died in the eastern Libyan city of Durner. And it could be up to 20,000 people. We just don't know the numbers yet.

And the water, it's come from a storm called Storm Daniel that's been hitting, the Mediterranean region and recently Libya in particular. And what happened was the storm moved over the very warm Mediterranean waters at this time of year. And that made the storm intensify. And then by the time it got to Libya, it had a huge amount of water that it dumped over near Durner. And then the rain, well, it filled a normally very dry riverbed at this time of year. And that just caused a huge amount of pressure to build up at two dams that are built to protect the city from floods. Those both then collapsed. They couldn't withhold that water. And that unleashed a huge torrent across the city sweeping away entire neighborhoods. One estimate at the moment is that it could be as much as a quarter of the city has been destroyed. And much of the city is now covered in mud. Do we know if this is a climate change related event? So they've yet to do the study that definitively says this one was made much more likely because of climate change. But these sorts of storms, we know it's a it's a pattern.

that they are becoming more intense and they tend to linger around areas a little bit longer because of climate change. So that pattern where the storm moved over hot water and intensified, that's when we're seeing increasingly happen across the planet. And that is because of warmer temperatures across the planet. Was it a case that the infrastructure was just not prepared for this level of flooding? Yeah. So the World Meteorological Organization, their head said earlier this week that had the country had better warning systems, in place that there was enough time for many people to have fled. That wouldn't have necessarily protected the city. Of course, if the dams had been stronger, that could have done. But Libya has

had a decade of serious conflict. So much of its infrastructure has just been greatly reduced in effectiveness. You know, we hear about earthquakes, flooding, and it's always the early warning system that's not working too well. We've got more climate news. And this one is a study that says Earth is not doing so well when it comes to supporting humanity. This doesn't seem so good. What are the details here, Tim? Yeah, so this is all about a thing called planetary boundaries. And these were broad measures that are meant to look at Earth's health as a whole that were developed a few years ago by some researchers at the Postdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. And there are nine of these measures and a new study, well, it says that on six of them,

Earth is operating beyond the safe operating space for humanity. That's not good. How are we doing on the other three metrics? Yeah, so the other three, well, two of them, it says that we're actually going in the wrong direction as well, and then there's only one where it seems to be okay. And the things that these planetary boundaries cover, well, the one in the main six group, they represent Earth's climate, biodiversity, land, freshwater, nutrient pollution, that sort of thing.

And then the ones in the sort of other three, that's the acidity of the oceans and the health of the air. And those, we're not currently outside the safe operating space, but it's getting worse. And then the final one is the ozone layer, which is actually doing okay. Any chance turning things around here? Yeah, so something that these researchers have been looking at is what the interplay is between the different planetary boundaries. And they found in repeated simulations that they're interconnected. So if one of them worsens, then many of the others do too. but also if one of them improves, that can also have effects on the others as well.

And so, for example, they suggest that if we really focused on improving how we treat Earth's land, for example, by planting many, many trees, that could have a big impact on the biodiversity, planetary boundary, the climate change planetary boundary. It would also improve fresh water that have many, many different effects. All right, given all the gloom and doom today, we could use some fun news, and you've got a story about how cockatoos make their own drumstool. for mating displays. Are we talking musical birds here? Yeah, these creatures are absolutely amazing. So the specific cockatoos we're talking about are called palm cockatoos. And they're

basically like the Ringo Star of Nature. So they've got these like rock star spiky crests. They have a very cool red patch on their cheeks. And the males, like you say, they make drumsticks from twigs or seed pods. And then they sort of bash them against trees as part of their mating display to the females. And part of it that I really love is once they're done, they throw away their drumsticks, which is really like end of a rock concert type of move. Yeah, yeah. They don't smash them on the tree, though. Yeah, they don't smash them on the tree. Although I mention sometimes they do break.

But what's been discovered now is that, you know, we've known this for a while that they have these mating displays. But what's been discovered now is that each drummer has a specific drumstick preference. Really? Yeah. So when they throw away their drumsticks, obviously this is a perfect opportunity for research. is to go around and collect them. And so they gathered up over 250 drumsticks. And then they found that each individual cockatoo,

they seem to have really specific preferences. So some of the ones they prefer a long, pointy drumstick, and they then stick with that, basically the whole of their lives. And other ones, they prefer short, stumpy ones. Some of them prefer the seed pods over the twigs. But either way, it's an individual preference that they stick with. Our last story is about a really cool super glue alternative made from biodegradable materials. Tell me about that one. I'm waiting for that. Yeah, so it's made from soyobine oil, and it's meant to hold as well as most standard epochsies. And so those are glues that are used in many, many different applications, but they're made out of plastic. And so they take thousands of years to biodegrade. And this new glue, well, it was inspired by the way that muscles can hold on to rocks. And the sort of glue that they create themselves for that is it's sort of

organic material. It's a bio substance. The team that built this glue from soybean oil, they calculate that if we started using that instead, that the related emissions from glue would go down by about fivefold. Wow. Wow. How much stress can this super glue take? Yes. One of the interesting things about it is depending on exactly how they make it, they can vary how strong it is and how long it lasts. So that means they think that this glue could be used for everything from sticking labels onto cardboard boxes, but maybe for those you'd only want a glue that lasts a week or two before it breaks down and wouldn't have to be that strong for paper on cardboard, but that they could also make ones that would last years that could be used

for things like electronics or even in car manufacturing. Okay, I'm waiting. When could I get this in my market? Yeah, so that's always the, we might have to wait a little bit moment. They've not made this at a commercial scale. And that will be the tricky bit. But they think they could be able to do that and they've sort of worked out roughly how much it would cost to do that, which is often a, often a pun, not entirely intended, sticking point in these, this bits of research. And they reckon it would be maybe about 30% more expensive than standard epoxy. So that would be a bit of an increase. But potentially, if it had big environmental benefits, you could get companies willing to switch for that sort of price difference. Right. Well, Tim, as always, thank you for bringing us such

good stuff. Thanks for having me. Tim Revell, Deputy U.S. editor for New Scientist and host of the New Scientist Weekly Podcast based in New York. We're going to take a break and when we come back, tracking nuclear contamination through critters like turtles and hogs. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. When I say radioactive wildlife, I'll bet your brain goes to Chernobyl's wolves, which, believe it or not, despite the odds, are still thriving at the site of the nuclear disaster. Or maybe you've heard of the rat snakes in Fukushima that pick up radioactive contamination as they slither around. Well, let's add two more to that list of radioactive critters. Turtles and wild boar. Yes, the hairy pigs. They're the subjects of two new studies

that looked at radioactivity in wildlife and mapped out where it came from. Joining me are Dr. Siler Conrad, archaeologist at Pacific Northwest National Lab in Richmond. Washington, who worked on the Turtle Study, and Dr. George Steinhazer, professor of applied radio chemistry at the Vienna University of Technology in Vienna, Austria, who looked at boar. Welcome to Science Friday. Hello. Thank you for having us. Nice to have you. Okay, then let's start with your study about wild boars. Why choose them? Because they're famous, actually. So ever since Chernobyl, they've been studied quite intensely in Europe. So we're not talking about Chernobyl or the vicinity of Chernobyl, we'll talk about central Europe, so Germany, Austria, Switzerland,

these countries, and they have been known to be radioactive. So they are known to accumulate radioactive cesium. But what is even more interesting than just the sole accumulation, basically they violate the law of physical decay because they keep more radioactive than they should be from a physical perspective. So the half-life of Season 137 is 30 years. And when we look at wildhog meat or their flesh, it keeps radioactive at levels that should no longer be allowed, should not be permitted by the half-life.

So they keep more and more radioactive than they should be, and we don't observe the half-life that we should observe. So that's fascinating. Why is that? Well, we tried to find it out, and we're still not fully there, but we have now published a paper that kind of shed some light onto the whole story. We looked into the isotopic composition of that cesium.

So until now, basically, or until like two weeks ago, everybody only looked at the Seism 137. And that's, of course, a very prominent fusion product, radioactive. And now we added another isotope that has not been observed previously in that system, and that's the Seism 135. And with those two, we can establish an isotopic fingerprint and it can tell us where does the Seism come from. Until a few years ago, everybody thought,

well, it must be all Chernobyl, or basically almost everything must be from Chernobyl because that's the prime source of radioactivity in Europe. But it turned out in our study that we found the fingerprint of nuclear weapons fallout, and that is very prominent actually in Wildhawks. So they keep their radiative. activity from 60 years ago. Wow. You must have been surprised by...

Oh, yeah. Basically, very much. We were very much surprised. Actually, when my PhD student first came to me and told me the results of his first measurements, he had a sad face, a frowny face, basically, and said something went wrong. The analysis wasn't correct. Because it looked like the result must be often. The analysis must be wrong. But in fact, fact, the fingerprint was so much dominated by the nuclear weapons fallout. The analysis was correct, but just our view of the world wasn't there yet. That is really fascinating. Why is it just the boars that are radioactive and not the other animals? We can only speculate about that, but I think it is because they are the only animals that get their food sources from underground,

especially in winter when it's cold and when food on the surface is scarce, then they have to dig. And so they dig down to find those truffles, not our human truffles, but these deer truffles. And they are known to be hyperaccumulators of radioactive cesium. And since the cesium moves very slowly through soil, it migrates very, very slowly, only tiny fractions of an inch per year,

the Chernobyl cesium has not arrived there yet. So these mushrooms, they still accumulate the old cesium from the 1960s, and the 1986 Chernobyl Seism has not even arrived there, at least not at its full extent. That's amazing. So what does this tell you then about how radioactive materials move around the world? Well, nature doesn't forget, right? So once a radionuclide has been released into the environment, of course, in many environmental compartments, we lose sight of this radioactivity after a while. So we're no longer worried about our apples or plums or whatever vegetables being contaminated from Chernobyl because the radioactivity or those radioactive atoms, those, those,

ions, they are immobilized in soil, they are washed out, so they just move elsewhere. And our vegetables and our apple trees can no longer take them up. But that doesn't mean that the season is gone. It's just elsewhere. And we found this elsewhere is all in the wild boar. That's amazing. Silor, let's move to your study about uranium in turtles shells. Why turtles?

Yeah, that's something that we were really interested in, because, we wanted to understand ways in which we could establish long-term records of contamination, essentially over the 20th century, when all of these activities were occurring, especially above-ground nuclear testing. And we wanted to find a way to measure those records accurately in real time when those events occurred. And so you can imagine that something like a tree ring that is a really useful environmental kind of sink because it's able to capture different information within the rings, and you can backtrack and essentially establish these chronological records through time.

But radioactive and essentially radio nuclites like uranium, it migrates within tree ring layers. And so you might see uranium signals from nuclear events that are occurring prior to when they should have. And you can think of 1945 as essentially the onset of this. And in some studies, we know that uranium moves between tree rings. And so it's not entirely a useful type of sample to look at these long-term records over time. But we know that turtles and I mean turtles and tortoises and sea turtles, they grow that colorful material on the back of their shelves. It's called scoot keratin. And it's a tissue that's quite similar to human fingernails, for example.

And they grow that material in sequential layers over time. And so we were able to find turtles that inhabited areas where past nuclear testing occurred or other types of nuclear activity and then sequentially analyze and pick up signals, very, very small signals of nuclear activities in the landscape from these turtle shells. It was really quite remarkable. We think of them as walking tree rings as an example. Turtle rings. Yeah. So how do you know where to go look for the rings on the turtles? Do you have special places you look for? Yep. You know, different turtles grow that scooke keratin in different ways. And we spent a lot of time with each of the different types of turtles that we were studying, actually working out the growth characteristics

of that shell scoot keratin to understand, okay, we know that we have a layer that was formed at this time. And so we can sample that layer and get a picture to essentially this calendar year. And so we spent a lot of time working out the, essentially the mechanics and the growth characteristics of scoot keratin for different turtles from these different locations where nuclear events occurred. How does the uranium end up in the turtles in the first place? Yeah, it's a really interesting process. And as George was just mentioning, I think there's a fun connection here between sort of what wild boar are experiencing and also how turtles are experiencing this out in the environment, where we know that sediments, for example, are trapping these radionuclides or trapping these elements and isotopes. They're being accumulated and retained within different organisms, plants and animals in different ways.

Because turtles are on the ground, they're digging their burrows, they're breathing in the dust of some of these environments, there seems to be a very clear mechanism in the routing of this contamination into their tissues, which is then deposited in that scoot keratin on their shells from things like sediments and soils, and then also the plants that they're consuming that are growing and living within those same sediments and soils. This is really interesting. You know, I want to know if there could be some very old. old turtles still around, maybe 100 years old, with radiation from the first nuclear tests. Yep.

It's quite possible. And we're really interested in trying to find those types of samples. You know, we were still studying lots of different turtles and tortoises and sea turtles out there. But, you know, Galapagos tortoises, for example, or sea turtles that have a very long-lived life, it is quite possible that they might be picking up these signals or might have picked up these signals in real time when they experience those events sort of on this global scale. And we focused our work on museum specimens, and that helped us find really special and unique turtles from, say, the Oak Ridge Reservation that was collected in 1962, but had a

sequence back to 1955. You know, it's really quite remarkable. And I think, you know, there's still a lot to learn, I think. We've established that we can measure these very small quantities of elements and isotopes. So then turtle shell. And now this really opens up a much larger question. Okay, how many different turtles are picking this up from what types of environments and how far back does that record go in time?

And really that leads us to being able to establish and reconstruct really specific, localized and regional records of contamination, either through fallout or through other types of waste in the environment. We can pick up those records in these turtles. What surprised you about your findings with turtles? You said, oh my goodness, I never expected that. Yeah. We were surprised in many ways.

In one way, we were surprised that we were able to actually do this because there had been a lot of previous research on turtles, especially sort of measuring the radioactivity in turtles as an entire animal. So we were really surprised that, say, you take a green sea turtle from in a Weetock in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. It's collected 20 years after testing ends, and yet the analysis of its shell scute keratin is picking up a very distinct uranium isotopic ratio that is telling us something about the testing that occurred roughly 20 years prior to when that turtle died and was collected. So we were really surprised at the specific isotopes that were still present in these shells, even though they're in such small quantities, that they were able to accurately tell us something about that nuclear event in the landscape. and it was very closely tied. And really, it retained that information and was able to tell that story about what we've known about these nuclear legacies throughout the world. George, a study from a few years ago found that snakes around Fukushima carry radiation in their bodies. And of course, Chernobyl's wolves are a famous example. How is your study similar or

different from those? I don't want to bore you with my bore study too much. So if there's so many You got that in. You had to get that. You're on the right show for a pun like that. If there's so many interesting animals out there. So actually, I would like to add fish at some point to this collection. So I love fishing. So that would be interesting.

So, of course, our study is in line with all those previous studies that shows the accumulation of a radioactive material in some organism. What we can add now is like a different dimension by using this isotopic fingerprint, the ratio of the two isotopes that we have studied, the C-ZM-135 and the 137, we can now expand our knowledge and we can show mixing effects. And we can also show the build-up of the accumulation, so that is kind of a snowball effect. and some animals are more sensitive in a way than others, and they are more prone to accumulation.

And the boar certainly, one of those, certainly. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We're talking about how scientists can study radiation through wildlife. Let's look at the big picture. What do studies like this? Tell us about the environmental and health effects of nuclear weapons, George. Well, it doesn't come as a surprise that the fallout from nuclear weapons explosions from the 1950s and 60s that started to become worrisome in a way.

It's not a surprise that President Kennedy and Nikita Hushchev negotiated the partial test ban treaty that was open for signature in 1963 that banned all atmospheric nuclear explosions. And that was, in my understanding, was pretty much an emergency break because the Northern Hemisphere got contaminated pretty severely with the nuclear weapons fallout. So I don't know the numbers for the cesium,

but for plutonium, I think the number is when you go into your backyard and you grab a handful of dirt, you're also holding 1 billion atoms of plutonium in your hands. That is a result from the fallout in the 1950. Everybody is? Everybody's backyard on the whole northern hemisphere. Could not be too remote from anywhere, everywhere.

It's global fallout. That's a sobering image I'm having. Well, that's the onset of the Anthropos scene. That's when when humankind started to shape nature as a whole. Wow, Siler, the U.S. has a long nuclear legacy. What can studies like yours tell us about this? Yeah, our work studying these turtles is really, you know, it's highlighted to us the ability to use certain types of animals in the environment

to reconstruct something about these events in the environment. You know, something, and I think George is speaking to this too, the capability today, the sensitivity of our instrumentation in order to be able to even measure these isotopes and understand the mixing and the routing of those isotopes in the environment, that really allows us now to take a step back and really look back in time, try and find some of these animals or other organisms that are growing these sequential tissues similar to a tree ring or like George mentioned, a lake sediment core, even an ice core, something like that, and be able to actually measure those radio nuclides from human events and understand, okay, this is what a specific record looks like from this location. And I think, you know, for turtles and tortoises and sea turtles, there's something even more broadly relevant and important about their ability to retain this type of environmental information in their scoot tissue in a sequential way. And that is really important because as we need to find ways to study and understand, say,

regional and localized effects of climate change, for example. There's a lot of isotopic and elemental information that's embedded within those sequential scoot layers. And I think that if we focus our research back onto the environment and trying to understand these animals and organisms, we can really reconstruct something about our human past and that anthropogenic impact in the environment on those landscapes and help better understand how we can essentially mitigate and prepare for the future. Fascinating stuff, gentlemen. I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much. Sure. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Dr. Siler Conrad,

archaeologist at Pacific Northwest National Lab in Richland, Washington, Dr. George Steinhauser, professor of applied radio chemistry at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria. We have to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about how relying on public transit can be dangerously hot. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNL. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. Many cities across the country have climate action plans in place, ways to decrease citywide emissions and make a transition to clean energy. Houston, Texas is one of those cities. One of the ways Houston plans to cut emissions. is by encouraging the use of public transit, like the city's bus system.

But journalists from Houston Public Media report that Houston's bus stops reach dangerously hot temperatures and that the existing bus shelters don't keep people cool as they wait for the bus, making taking the bus not a very enticing alternative. Joining me to talk about this are my guests, Sarah Willa Ernst, health reporter for Houston Public Media, Katie Watkins, Environmental Reporter for Houston Public Media. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having us. Hi, Ira. Katie, let's start with you. Can you explain what Houston's bus system is like, how big it is? Is it reliable? Yeah. So, you know, Houston's bus system is pretty big. It covers 1,300 square miles in the greater Houston area. And it has more than 9,000 bus stops, you know, which were the focus of our investigation. In terms of reliability, it really depends on who you ask. Many writers we spoke with said they do find the bus pretty reliable. They use an app to plan out their trip, and that way they can reduce the amount of time they're waiting at a hot bus stop. But a lot of other riders we spoke with said a lot of times the bus is late or the app will say it's going to arrive at a certain time and then it just never shows up.

And in those cases, people can end up waiting outside for a lot longer than they had planned. Sarah, let's talk about who uses the buses in Houston. Is it a popular way to travel? So for those of you who haven't been to Houston, Texas, it is absolutely a car-centric city. I mean, this is the oil and gas capital. And so you kind of have to go out of your way to see pedestrians and see transit riders if you're just driving through town. It's not a particularly ubiquitous form of transportation. But the people who do take it rely on it quite a bit.

There are about 4 million rides for the month of June this year. And the people that take it, they take it pretty much every day. 70% take it five days a week. And, you know, those people also, the way that they get to the bus station is by pretty much walking or biking. So it seems like a lot of these people don't have access to cars. And public transit is the way that they get around. Katie, and you're reporting you wanted to know just how hot Houston's bus stops are. Well, how hot were they? Pretty hot. For context, we took measurements in a metric called wet bulb globe temperature. Experts say that better captures the impact of heat stress on the body because in addition to air temperature and humidity, it also measures solar radiation, so the heat from the sun. And with WBGGT, once it gets over 90, it's considered an extreme risk of heat illness. And that's when experts recommend everyone take precautions if they're outside.

And so we found that nearly three quarters of our readings inside bus shelters were above that threshold, above 90 WBGT. And in some cases, they got as high as 103 degrees. And we also found that bus shelters were a bit inconsistent. You know, when they provided shade, it was cooler than direct sunlight. But in some cases, about 16% of the time, we found that temperatures inside bus shelters were actually hotter than standing in direct sunlight. We showed our results to Brian Stone. He's the director of the Urban Climate Lab at Georgia Tech. Well, that's horrifying. It's really not good. Like, you should not be standing out there. So if you're measuring, you know, north of 90, I don't know of any chart that says you should be, you should be outside. You don't have to be moving around as an elderly person with a heart condition to be in a danger zone at 90.

Keep in mind, we did this pilot study in late July and early August, which are some of the hottest months of the year here in Houston. And we decided to focus on rush hour readings so that we can capture it's the hotest, of the day, and it's probably a time where most people are using the bus as well. Sarah, I know you spoke to people who ride the Houston bus system. What did they tell you? We heard that it was really, really hot. I think that is quite obvious by standing out there and anybody who's used the public transit system. And it was definitely reflected in our temperature readings, too. You know, it isn't just waiting at the bus stop, but it's also walking to the bus stop. It's also the transfers that are involved as well. And all that time really adds up being outside in the heat. And we heard kind of a range of how that affected people's lives. Sometimes

they would skip using the bus during really, really hot days. And then there were also some health impacts too. We heard quite a few stories about, I would say, more mild health impacts, like experiencing migraines, headaches, skin irritation by being out in the sun, too. We heard. We heard quite a few stories about, I would say, I would say more mild health impacts, like experiencing migraines, headaches, skin irritation by being out in the sun too much. And then we heard some that were on the more moderate end. We interviewed one woman who experienced what we think is heat syncope, a type of heat illness. And basically she passed out while in transit. That happened to her a couple of times. And it also nearly happened to her daughter. You know, one time she was at a grocery store after taking the bus and she saw her daughter's face. And she saw her daughter's

turned bright red like a tomato, almost purple, she said. And in that moment, she was at around the checkout area. She grabbed some of the water bottles by those little mini-fridges and just doused her daughter with that cold water. And it likely prevented her from experiencing more severe heat illness at that moment. We also spoke to another woman. Her name is Juana Bendoza. And we caught her at the bus stop in a neighborhood called Gulfden. So it was too hot.

I was so dizzy. I got, give me some water. So I share it with my son. Do we know how many people have been hospitalized from waiting in hot bus stops? We don't have any data on hospitalizations, but we do have 911 data. We submitted a records request to the Houston Fire Department. And in the months of June and July this year, we saw at least 16 calls from people at bus stops or on the bus for temperature-related problems. I think it's pretty safe to say that that is heat illness in the middle of summer as opposed to a different type of temperature-related problem.

But we are fairly sure that this is an undercount, at least 200 calls during that period of time. And these were calls at the bus stop or on the bus that were labeled under unconscious person or sick person, these types of descriptions that could be construed as heat illness. And then there were also the people who don't call 911. The woman that I mentioned earlier at the grocery store with her daughter, she didn't call 911 during the multiple occasions that she or her daughter has experienced heat illness. That's interesting. You mentioned before how the bus shelters can be hotter inside than standing outside in the sun. Katie, is there a type of bus shelter that is the best under extreme heat? Yeah, well, I'll start by saying, I guess, what the hottest bus shelters all had in common in terms of design. And that was, you know, they all had plexy glass like material on three sides. And so our theory is that, you know, they were acting like mini greenhouses. And when the sun was shining directly inside, they were, you know, trapping the heat inside and making it hotter. On the flip side, the bus shelters where we recorded the coolest temperatures had more of an open design. And they all, you know,

had lush tree canopies that were providing shade as well. And Sarah, let's talk about how Houston has responded to this. Is there any sense that this issue will be addressed? Well, that's our hope. We did send a description of our pilot study, our key findings, to the public transit agency called Metro here. And they did not acknowledge our pilot study. They said it would not bear any significance,

given that they didn't know the type of device that we, used and any other variables that might impact the study, although we offer to be as transparent as possible and give them all our raw data and walk them through our data analysis. We are trying to schedule interviews with people at the city of Houston, not just the transit agency, and that will actually be the subject of our next episode. Katie, speaking of solutions, what would you suggest from your research? Are there any possible solutions that could be implemented? Yeah, so I sort of alluded to this earlier, but one source of shade that really stood out in our readings were trees. So, you know, temperatures and tree shade were always cooler than direct sunlight. We only had one reading that crossed into that extreme heat risk category.

Tree shade was also twice as cool as bus shelter shade. On average, it was about six degrees cooler than direct sunlight. And so one potential solution would be to plant trees near bus stops where there's space space. to do so. And then when trees aren't possible, there may be opportunities to look at alternative shade structures. So we also spoke to one group in Houston who's working on a design for a trellis like structure that could work in some of these smaller areas. And when can listeners expect part two of this story coming out later this month, Sarah? Episode three of our podcast Hot Stops comes out on September 21st, and that same day will be the second web story that publishes on our website, Houstonpublicmedia.org.

And that's about all the time we have for this segment. Thank you both for your work and for coming on Science Friday. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Sarah Willa Ernst, health reporter for Houston Public Media, Katie Watkins, Environmental Reporter for Houston Public Media. And you can read more about this story on our website, science Friday.com slash hot stops.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. The NFL season is in full swing, and if you've been watching football for a long time, you may have noticed some changes. The uniforms and the helmets have changed a lot, but did you notice that the numbers are different, too? Really? Here's the story. For most of the NFL's history, wide receivers can only pick jersey numbers between 80 and 89. But in 2004, the league loosened this policy, allowing players to also pick numbers. numbers between 10 and 19, which it turns out many preferred, saying that the one looked slimmer than the eight and made them feel thinner and faster. So as of 2019, 80% of wide receivers make

the switch. But is there an actual association between the smaller numbers and the perception of body size? When Ladon Shams, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at UCLA, heard about this. She ran a study to confirm the superstition and touchdown, turns out, those wide receivers were onto something. Dr. Shams, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. Nice to have you. Okay. Why did you want to do this study? How did you come up with this idea? Well, it was inspired by an interview with an ESPN reporter who had done a survey and had discovered this preference by the athletes and wondered if there is a perceptual basis to this preference. And because no one had looked into this, the association between numbers and perceptual size,

we decided to test this ourselves. Right. Tell me how you went about testing it. We presented pictures of football players, computerized images, and we created a large variety of sizes. and colors of jerseys and skin tones with a variety of different numbers, but the numbers varied from 80 to 89 and from 10 to 19. And we made sure that each of these players was presented twice, once with the low jersey number and once with the high jersey number.

So we asked them to rate the slenderness or huskiness of each player, and then we went back and looked at how these ratings compared for the same player, and we noticed that the athletes with high jersey numbers were rated as more husky or less slender than the athletes with low jersey numbers. But we didn't fully trust these results because online experiments, there are a lot of factors that we cannot control. So we decided to repeat this in the lab when the university reopened and controlled for other factors, and we got the same results. And what was your reaction that this perception was actually confirmed in the data?

It was really surprising, even though we had a hunch that there may be something going on in terms of association between size and number, but this was still surprising because it is a connection between something which is really high level of processing in the brain, the understanding of numbers.

Numbers are concepts that we learn and we have to acquire knowledge about to appreciate that AD is a larger, and 18 or so on. And the task involved a fraction of second of looking at these pictures. And yet, the knowledge and concept of numbers influence the perception of size. So this was very surprising for us. So it wasn't that the one is skinnier and make you feel like you're skinnier and the eight is bigger and huskier? It was that the number was higher, so you felt it made you feel huskier. Yes, exactly. It's not that.

visual size of the number, but it's the understanding the concept of the number that is influencing the perception of size. So you can't say that wide receivers with lower numbers actually make more completions or are more agile than those with higher numbers. That's right. Yeah. What are some of the ways to think about how this research can be applied to our daily lives outside of football? Is there a way that can happen? Well, the brain is in the business of making educated guesses. The shape of objects, the color, the size, the speed, all of these things have to be estimated nonstop every moment of our waking hours for us to be able to function. The exposure to these associations help us make better educated guesses, estimate things more

accurately and more precisely on a daily basis. And this is an implicit bias. It's a demonstration of how unaware we are of all the things that get stored and noticed by our brains, even when we're not paying attention. And really, the only effective way to get rid of implicit bias is to change those underlying statistical patterns and regularities. So if we want people to be less biased towards a certain group, we just have to make sure that those groups and individuals have a better representation, and that would lead in turn to learning of those associations or unlearning of the past associations. Well, I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today, Dr. Shams. I don't think I'll ever look at a wide receiver the same way.

It was my pleasure. Dr. Ladon Shams is Professor of Psychology, Bioengineering, and Neuroscience at UCLA. And that's about all the time we have for this hour. Here's some of the folks who helped make this show happen. Nahima Ahmed is our manager of impact strategy. Emma Gomez is our digital producer, Santiago Flores, our community manager. Diana Plasker is our experiences manager, and Ariel Zitch is our director of audience. BJ Leatherman, composed our few music, and of course, if you missed any part of the program, would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts, or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday.

You can always reach us all week on social media or email us the old-fashioned way. SciFri at Science Friday.com. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.