Science Friday - Randall Munroe, Football Concussion Research. Sept 6, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: September 6, 2019

If you’ve ever been skiing, you might have wondered how your skiis and the layer of water interact. What would happen if the slope was made out of wood or rubber? Or how would you make more snow in the most efficient way if it all melted away? These are the questions that comic artist Randall Munroe thinks about in his book How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems. He answers these hypothetical scenarios and other everyday questions—from charging your phone to sending a digital file—with uncommon solutions. Munroe joins Ira to talk about how he comes up with his far-fetched solutions and why “…figuring out exactly why it’s a bad idea can teach you a lot—and might help you think of a better approach.” Read an excerpt of Munroe’s new book where tennis legend Serena Williams takes to the court to test one of his hypotheses: How to catch a drone with sports equipment. Plus: Researchers have long known about the connection between concussions sustained on the football field and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a neurodegenerative illness caused by repeated head injuries. But another group of researchers wondered—what about the hits that don’t result in a concussion? They found that even when a player didn’t show outward signs of having a concussion, their brains were showing symptoms of injury. Brad Mahon, associate professor in the department of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, and Adnan Hirad, MDPhD candidate in the Medical Sciences Training Program at the University of Rochester, share the results of their investigation into the unseen impacts of head injuries on football players.     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. Can you smell that? Yeah. Fall is in the air. But to some people, it's not the falling leaves or the falling temperatures. It's the falling football players diving head first into the football season. Well, metaphorically, at least, right? We've known for a while about the connection between concussion sustained on the gridiron and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

It's a neurodegenerative illness caused by repeated head injuries. NFL officials have made efforts to prevent concussions on the playing field, making rule adjustments, tweaks to players' helmets. But a group of researchers wondered, what about the hits that don't result in a concussion? So many of them on the field, they're just hits. They're not concussion-producing. Could players' brains still?

be impacted. Well, they found that even when a player did not show outward concussion symptoms, their brains were showing signs of injury, signs they say that could one day lead to CTE. So what does this mean for the game of football in the NFL and Antonio Brown's recent drama over updated helmet technology? We asked you this week, do you think football leagues are doing enough to protect players' brains. You sent in your answers through the new Science Friday Vox Pop app. CV in Massachusetts had this to say. I think that possibly we should not have football players to wear helmets.

And the reason is that the helmets can only protect the skulls and can't protect people's brains. The brains will bounce off the inside of their skull and give them a concussion. And I think the helmets may contribute to making players feel like they are protected when they actually aren't very protected at all. If you want to wait on that question, you can leave us a comment on the Science Friday Vox Pop app, download it, or give us a call now.

Our number 844-724-8255-844 SciTalk, or, of course, you can tweet us at SciFRI. Now here to share the results of their study published recently in Science Advances are my two guests. Atman here, Ed, is an MD-PhD-HD candidate in the Medical Sciences Training Program at the University of Rochester. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having, Ira.

You're welcome. Dr. Brad Mahone is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Welcome to both of you. Thank you, Ira. The caller that you just heard described the brain bouncing off the inside of the skull. Is that really what happens, Brad? I think the caller put her finger really on the key issue. When we look at how helmets do protect the head, it's clear that they protect the head from catastrophic injury.

They protect the skull. But as she noted, the damage that's caused by head hits, for instance in football, is caused by rapid acceleration and deceleration of brain tissues and their contact with the inside of the skull. And the helmet really doesn't protect against that. Well, Adon, how is the helmet then supposed to help? with this? Well, you know, it's really important that we prevent, again, like Brad was saying, contusions to the brain tissue itself. And so over the last, you know, several decades, we have made a lot of improvements on preventing skull fractures and injuries to the brain tissue itself. What it's not doing so far is protecting the brains from the sheer waves that travel

throughout the brain after an impact that then cause microstructural damage to white matter tissue in the brain. Obviously, there are certain advancements that they can do in terms of padding and such, but the results of that research and those improvements are still out. You see, there's a shear wave. Is that like a little earthquake in your brain? That's exactly how I would describe it. Little ripple effects that sort of trace.

across the tissue and the material properties of the different tissue types within the brain. For example, you know, comparing the cortex to the brain stem is not the same. And so, you know, the energy waves do not travel in similar pattern across the brain because the brain is not homogeneous. And those tissue sort of those boundary areas where the different tissue types are connecting are places where we think injury is actually occurring. Now, I've found that there's a connection between multiple concussions and CTE, but your study found that you don't have to have a concussion to have an injury? Yeah, so what we, you know, said was we were going to look for the, you know, seasonal changes to white matter structure and deficits that occur as, you know, from just playing a season of football.

and we wanted to see what that would be like. What we were showing is that there's damage to white matter structure just from playing a season of football without even sustaining a concussion. Now, what that means in terms of recovery over time and how that results in long-term neurodegenerative process is still out, and we don't have, you know, currently a succinct way to connect the sort of seasonal injuries to prognosis of sort of sort of.

CET over time. And then that is, you know, these are studies that are ongoing that can be, you know, that can hopefully provide some clarity to that. Dr. Mahon, you basically conducted these studies in what I would call teenagers, right? That's right. Might this also be happening in pee-wee football and even, you know, younger than teenage levels? I don't think there's any reason to believe it's not happening in younger age groups.

and I would suggest that we don't even necessarily need to do the studies in younger age groups to conclude that it is happening. There's no reason to believe, as Dr. Herod was alluding to, the brain has different elastic properties and different tissues, and a lot of the injury that we're measuring, we think, is arising because different tissues with different elasticity absorb the forces of head hits differently. And so those forces tend to cause injury at the junction between tissues that have different abilities to absorb those forces. And that's going to be exactly the same in a young brain as it is in an old brain overall. There's always going to be these junctions of different rigidities or elasticity in the tissue. How do we know that these injuries could one day lead to CTE?

Adman? So, you know, the CET studies that have been conducted are post-mortem studies, right? So players that have passed away donate their brains in groups, including Dr. Amalu and McKee at Boston, are looking at these brains after these patients die. What they find is that the tauopathy or the injury and the disease process is correlated more with repetitive more with repetitive head hits than the concussions these players sustained throughout their lives as they played this game. Again, there's a lot of evidence now suggesting that repetitive het trauma is more correlated, again, with CTE than one of concussions. And the evidence obviously is observational.

It's retrospective at this point, but it certainly is concerning. And now studies like ours are suggesting that there are seasonal changes from playing a season of football. So, I mean, the question is, how do we go from a single season to cumulative number of seasons leading to this injury down the line? That question is still out. Well, it's also a question of whether there could be such a thing as a safe helmet. Is there such a thing? Certainly, you know, the day, I mean, if you just looked at the helmets that are in the market right now and you looked at the, They have warning labels on them that basically say exactly that.

These helmets cannot eliminate the risk of concussion. The risk of concussion in the NFL has been the same over the last seven years since they've started producing numbers and allowing it for the public to review. Starting from 2012 to 2018 last year, the numbers fluctuate. but they've stayed about the same. So we have not, if there's such a nirvana that could potentially stop concussions from occurring, we have not found it yet. Right.

There have been any reaction from the NFL or the football industry in general about this possibly being a paradigm shift in this discovery? Well, I think it's important to recognize that in the scientific literature, there has been an emerging consensus over the past five to ten years that there there's a causal link between many subconcussive head hits and long-term changes to the brain. We haven't had any direct response yet in the setting of our study, but I think one of the things that we were able to show is that while it has already been recognized that there's a connection between repetitive subconcussive head hits and ultimately changes in the brain,

we were able to show a dose-dependent effect. we were able to show that players who had more hits of a certain type had more serious changes in their brain compared to players who had fewer hits of a certain type. And my hope is that this provides a foothold to think forward toward new technologies that would allow us to infer when injury is occurring in the brain independent and prior to players exhibiting signs and symptoms of concussion. Tell me about that different kinds of hits. We always see a head-on hit.

what you're talking about? Are there two different kinds of hits? So when this study was designed initially in the laboratory of Dr. Jeff Bezarian, who's an ER doc and a concussion expert at the U of R.V.R. They outfitted collegiate football players with accelerometers in their helmets. And these accelerometers, they measure not just the direction of every hit, but they also measure two aspects of its force. It's the linear deceleration associated with the hits, so the sort of in-line stopping of the head. and then the rotational acceleration or the twisting of the head that's caused by the head. And in some of the analyses that Dr. Hurad did for this paper, he was able to show that even if you statistically partial out the contribution of linear acceleration, so you remove the forces

that are associated with in-line stopping of the head, and you just look at the effect of the twisting motions, the twisting motions of the head are themselves sufficient to explain the kinds of changes that we're seeing in players' brains. So you do away with the head butts that they're trying to get rid of, but you still have the mist hit? That's right. And really, every time that there is a change in acceleration, there's a change in acceleration, both in terms of the in-line trajectory of the head, but also in terms of its rotational

characteristics. We're going to have to take a break. I want to thank Dr. Brad Mahone, Associate Professor in the National. Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Herod is going to stay with us. When we come back, we're going to talk about what the NFL is doing or not doing to prevent concussions on the field. Our number, 844-724-8-25-Stay with us.

We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking this hour about new concussion research and what it means for the safety of football helmets. And we've been taking your comments on football and concussions via our new Science Friday a Vox Pop app, which lets you easily share your voice comments with us. And here's a comment from Michael in Knoxville.

What he had to say? In football, there's a dangerous conflict of interest between the teams who take responsibility for the well-being of their players and also need those players on the field to win the games. Until the league itself takes over the responsibility for the player's well-being and makes the decision whether or not a player can play after an injury, we will always have this problem of teams putting players back on the field when they shouldn't be. Let us know what you think.

Besides Michael from Knoxville, you can all download our Science Friday Voxpop app and let us know. And here to continue talking with us about this is our guest, Dr. Adnan Harad, an MD PhD candidate in Medical Sciences Training Program, University of Rochester. Let me talk about this discovery about the two different ways of twisting in your brain. The league has made changes to try and prevent concussions from happening, but that's all focused on the linear acceleration. And the research we're talking about says it's not the linear acceleration that's the

real culprit, it's the turning of the head. It certainly is true. And more importantly, you know, a little bit of history on helmet safety. rankings that the NFL is using to bar Antonio Brown from using his previous helmet is actually important to sort of go through. So around 2010, 2011, the NFL started testing helmets that the manufacturers were making available to the players. And the conditions they used were simulated conditions from games. They took dummies and retrofitted them with these helmets. And what they found was that the testing conditions that were resulting in a lot of concussions were helmet-to-helmet sort of scenarios.

And so to their credit, the NFL made that particular sort of hit illegal. What we, what's not, you know, public knowledge at this point is the fact that 70% of concussions that are occurring in these seasons are due to, scenarios that have not been tested in the lab. These are helmet-to-ground impacts. They are, you know, helmeted heads against the bodies of the other player. And so these conditions have not been tested. And so, you know, it's like me, you know, telling you, Ira, that, you know, that your car manufacturer telling you, we've tested your brakes, but it's only on 30% of possible driving conditions.

and the rest of, you know, 70% of the driving conditions that you will experience, we just don't know how your brakes are going to function. I don't know if you would buy that particular car. I certainly wouldn't. A couple of quick phone calls we can get to. Let's go to Patrick and San Francisco. Hi, Patrick. Hey, how are you?

Hi there. Go ahead. Yeah, just a quick observation. So the game of rugby doesn't have helmets, and its general consensus is that this disease is dramatically less pervasive in that space. And it's obviously a very similar game, very aggressive physical contact and tackling. And also just referencing the comment about helmets,

essentially not preventing brain damage or brain impact, but definitely masking the body sensation of impact, which if anything protects the skin and protects the bone, but masks repetitive damage to the brain. I'm of the opinion, if anything, removing helmets completely is potentially the simplest solution, a slight modification to the game, the removal of helmets. Let me get a reaction to that. What do you think, Dr. Herod?

Well, I really can't talk to the effects. You know, removing the helmets completely, you know, again, I'm for evidence-based changes. At this point, I'm not sure if that is going to resolve the problems. we're having, but certainly improving the helmets themselves, at least to make sure that they address these other impact scenarios that are known to result in concussion. Again, the 70% of concussions I'm talking about from NFL games from 2015 to 2017. So improving the helmets so that they can at least address some of these impacts and these other scenarios going to be really important.

And right now, the NFL is not setting the standards for what is needed for player safety. Manufacturers are producing these helmets, and then the NFL is just ranking them as they come. There are no thresholds that they set themselves. Is it possible that other sports where heads are getting knocked, you know, martial arts, boxing, that sort of stuff, have the same kind of thing going on? Oh, yeah. In boxing, we've known it for a long time that they result in a condition, very similar. to CTE because of this repetitive head blows. And the number of years, for example, a player had played was sort of correlated with, you know,

the occurrence of what they call, you know, dementia pugilistica. And so it's been known in that now UFC and other types of games are younger, so we don't know what the results of that are going to be. Well, quite interesting. We've run out of time. I'd like to thank you for taking time to be with us today. Well, thank you so much for having me. Dr. Outdan Harrod, an MD PhD candidate in the Medical Sciences Training Program at the University of Rochester.

Have you ever found yourself pondering an idea that sounds wacky at first? But you still would like to know, right? You come up with an idea like, can you land an airplane on a submarine? Sounds wacky? Can you do it? My next guest likes to ponder absurd solutions for simple ideas. For example, his solution for filling up a pool. It involves harnessing the water from the air. And his idea for catching a drone involves having tennis star Serena Williams

hit tennis balls at the flying copters. And he actually had her do that. We'll talk about what happened. In his new book, How To Monroe works out the math and the science behind the most complex solutions to simple questions because he says, figuring out exactly why it's a bad idea can teach you a lot and might help you think of a better approach. Randall Monroe is creator of the webcomic,

XKCD.com, and his new book is called How To Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real World Problems, and we have an excerpt of his book on our website, ScienceFriday.com slash how to. Nice to talk to you, Randall. Hi, Ira. Thanks for having me. And it's quite interesting. This is a great book. Well, you know, it's got all kinds of things that I have thought about, you know, in my spare time while I'm driving, how crazy would it be to do that?

And you've actually figured out how to do some of these things. And you mentioned in your book that your solutions take a lot of detours, you know? Why make it so hard for yourself? Why did you want to figure out the most complicated solution for finding something? Well, the truth is I'm not trying to find the most complicated solution. I just tend to, you know, and I have a problem with some task to do. Sometimes there's an easy way to do it, but it's kind of really. repetitive or kind of difficult, and I'm always trying to think, what are some other ways I could do this?

I'm not trying to think of particularly good or bad ways, just other ways that I can then think through, like moving, for example, where, like, packing boxes is really difficult. And so I start wondering, like, I see houses on trucks sometimes. Could I just skip the move by lifting up an entire house, which then creates a much of new problems, like, how do you lift a house? How do you detach it from the foundation? Do you need to get wide load permits for each jurisdiction you travel through? And then solving each of those problems, trying to think how I'd do that, leads me to new ones.

Our number 8447248255, I know our listeners are going to have suggestions for how to do things, and maybe you'll have the answers for them. And one of your questions is how to throw things that starts with the story about George Washington, throwing maybe a dollar over the Potomac? How did you come up with that question? Well, there's If you're thinking about different ways of throwing things, you know, you think, well, who's really good at throwing? And there are all these stories about George Washington.

I think most of them come from after he died. There was a big market for Washington stories. So in some versions, it's one river, and sometimes it's the Rappahannock, sometimes it's the Potomac. Sometimes it's a silver dollar. Sometimes it's a rock. But the general agreement seems to be he threw something over some river, and it was very impressive. And so I was looking at, okay, can we come up with a model for how far it is practical to throw things? And I use that story as an example because I really like that you can come up with sometimes these really simple physics models

and just do a little bit of math on a piece of paper and suddenly get an answer about whether something is possible or not. I want you to tell the story because it was really fascinating. The Serena Williams story, the idea of how to swat or catch a drone involving tennis. are Serena Williams hitting tennis balls at it. How did you talk her into that? Well, I was surprised. So that was something I got to do with this new book that I've done a little bit before. But I got to do more here was reach out to people who know about how to do really cool stuff and ask them for advice and occasionally to do some kind of experiment.

And it's I was really surprised because I always felt like, oh, these people all have better things to do. You know, I'm bothering them. But people were all so enthusiastic and so excited to help out. And so I had been thinking about when you see one of those wedding photography drones floating around and you don't really know who's controlling it and you kind of want to get rid of it. There are all these, you know, high-tech ideas for what to do about them. But I was thinking, what if I'm just in my backyard? And I've got like a couple of, you know, there's like a basketball and a baseball and stuff.

I started wondering, would you be better off throwing a baseball at a drone or a basketball or a football? You know, they have different pros and cons. And this led me into sort of wondering about overall what sports equipment would be best for hitting a drone. And so I found a bunch of research on this, you know, research on accuracy in different sports. You know, how far, how fast, how precisely can baseball players throw baseballs, you know, and how accurate are soccer kicks. And so I started trying to work out which projectile from which sport would be best for hitting drones. And one of the ones that I was having trouble finding data on was, tennis. You know, I was just hadn't come across any studies yet that were useful for this particular

model. And I knew Alexis O'Hanian, Serena Williams' husband from a long time ago. We were acquaintances. And he had texted me about something. And I mentioned, oh, I'm working on this tennis problem, this tennis puzzle. And he said, oh, hey, if there's any way we can help out, let me know. And so I was, of course, excited. And so I asked, so I asked, I asked if Serena could maybe when she's at practice I don't want to take too much of her time maybe put up a little target on the wall

and hit a ball at that and then if they can take a video and give me the measurements of the room I can use that to build a model to figure out how effective she'd be against an actual drone but to my surprise it turned out they had an actual drone

and we're happy to take that out onto the court and so she did and she had someone fly the drone out over the middle of the court, well, she stood at the end and tried to see how many serves it would take to hit it. And she did better than your prediction, right? Yeah, I was trying to guess based on what I could find about tennis pro accuracy, and I had come up with, I think I had guessed about five to seven serves from that distance with that model drone as the target, and she got it in three.

So it could just be a statistical outlier. I sort of suspect it's just that Serena Williams is an outlier. She is that good. Yeah. Am I reflato talking with Randall Monroe. How to the book is called Abserved Scientific Advice for a Common Real World Problems. Like, you want to take down a drone? That's a common real world problem.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Did you have to limit the kinds of things you wanted to publish? or include in the book because there are so many different things that people ponder. Yeah, I always find with any problem, like if the answer's too easy, I always will like find a new problem to solve that will make it more complicated again. So I mostly had to limit myself from the research would always, every new new question that I asked would take me down a new research rabbit hole. And so the way I think about it is I try to then, once I've found as much as I can,

I kind of back up out of the rabbit hole and say, what are the coolest things that I found in all these individual problems I solved? And how can I pull them together? And so this book is sort of the compendium of me starting with a bunch of simple problems and doing that process until I was out of rabbit holes to go down, or at least out of energy. Well, you sometimes had some help. For example, you interviewed astronaut Chris Hadfield to figure out different scenarios

from making an emergency landing. Had he already thought about those questions? Well, I was really surprised. I thought I was going to ask, you know, I wanted to do a chapter on how to land a plane, how to do an emergency landing. And so I reached out to him because, you know, Colonel Hadfield is the commander of the International Space Station and also a really accomplished test pilot. So I thought he'd be a good person to ask.

But I was expecting him to, I was going to ask sort of how he would land in ever, how he would land in ever more silly situations. And I figured I'd start with the more normal ones and then work my mind. way up to the more and more ridiculous ones and then figured at some point he would say, like, this is a waste of time and hang up on me. But to my surprise, he seemed, first of all, you know, happy to answer as many questions as I could throw at him. And second, he had an answer for everything right away.

I would ask him about the strangest thing I could think of, you know, like, could you land a plane if you had to land on top of a moving train? And instead of saying that's a ridiculous question, he would say, oh, yeah, people have done that, you know, and then you start listing off. other vehicles that people have landed planes on under what circumstances and what you have to do land them. And so I discovered that my plan to try to fluster a test pilot by throwing weird extreme situations at him without warning might have been flawed. But it ended up being my very favorite chapter in the book. You talked about landing a plane on a submarine.

Yeah. Yeah. He called it a, oh yeah, it's sort of like a short, wet runway. Yeah. Yeah, he said, he said, you could. He said, but it can be hard to find a submarine when you need one. You also talked about how you'd have to land a plane if you couldn't reach the controls. Yeah, yeah. I throw things at them. I loved, yeah, if you had your sleeve closed in the cockpit door, I figured. You know, and you had to throw stuff at the controls. And he said, and he sounded like that one.

He didn't think you'd have much chance of success in that scenario. But he talked about which controls you could conceivably hit and how he would try to do it. The same for, I estimate, if he were locked on the outside of the plane somehow through some mishap and crawling around on the surface. as it was flying along, what part of the plane would he crawl to to try to take control somehow? And he had various answers. And there was no delay. That was my favorite thing.

I would ask the question, and then he would just launch right into the answer as if it was like, oh, sure, I've done this hundreds of times. You know, this is a first year pilot training kind of thing. And so that's part of what made that just so much fun. That's why he's up there and we're down here because he can do that sort of stuff. We're talking with Randall Monroe. We're going to take a break. It's a wonderful book.

It's called How to in small caps. I don't know why. Well, everything is small caps. How to absurd scientific advice for common real world problems. If you're looking for something to talk about tonight, you know, as I talk about over a beer, this is some great stuff in it. We're going to take a break. Take your calls. 844-724-8255.

Maybe you have something absurd that you would like to do. I have my own question. That's not in the book. want to talk to Randall about. 844-7248255. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking to Randall Monroe, creator of the webcomicxccd.com. His new book is called How to Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real World Problems. Lots of people would like to talk to you. Let's go to Amy and Tucson. Hi, Amy. Taking my call. I am so excited to

share this work, one of my sons just started attending a STEM school, STEM school here in Tucson. And I want to make sure that Randall's work is on the radar of some of his teachers. But my question for him is that my kids have taken part in an activity called Odyssey of the Mind. and I'm just wondering if that it's a creativity competition and it's an international gig, and I'm just wondering if that's ever been on Randall's radar if he's ever lent his work towards that organization or if he ever participated in it as a judge or a contestant. Randall? Have you ever heard of it?

No, I haven't. That sounds really cool. I've done, for me, when I was in high school, I competed in the first robotics competition, but I know there are a whole bunch of really similar, you know, a bunch of similar programs, a bunch of other creativity competitions, and they're all really cool. I was always vaguely intimidated, but also really excited about them. Let me see if you can get excited about my question. We've been on the air almost 30 years now, and a repeated question we get asked all the time. It's a topic of discussion is, is it possible to build a space elevator?

That would be, in other words, you would have an orbiting satellite that was stationary orbit. You drop down, you know, a line to the Earth, and you have a moving door, a room that goes up and down, like a space elevator. Have you ever thought of that one? Yeah, that's one of those ideas that's, like, right on the edge of something that physics suggests might be possible, just on the edge of possible, to where, like, and it would be such a huge undertaking that, that like it's really hard to even seriously start considering it, but at the same time, if you could build it, it would make access to space really easy. I think fundamentally we've got,

there's like a few breakthroughs in materials that we need. So if you want to build one of these space elevators, like the physics all works out except for the strength of the strand itself, the tether that you'd be climbing up to get to space, that tether we don't have any material that's strong enough to hold itself up as the Earth is spinning around, you know, in the weight of Earth's gravity. And so we just need to figure out a way to make some kind of stronger material. And if we can do that, then it might be possible. But we could do tether's other places in the solar system.

That's an interesting thing. And in my book, one of the things I talked about was the idea of dangling a tether from one of Mars's moons. and this is an idea that I'm pretty sure is a bad idea, certainly impractical, but I was surprised when I was sitting down to do calculations how it seemed not quite as impractical as I thought, which was if you dangle a tether from one of Mars's moons, you could have the end of the tether drag in the atmosphere

and then put wind turbines on that. And they'd have to be supersonic wind turbines, but the tip of the tether would be going pretty fast, and you could generate a fair amount of power that way. You'd also cause the moon's orbit to decay, so eventually it would crash into Mars and, you know, cause devastation. Details, details, yeah, you know. It's like a lot of our energy sources.

It would give us free power for now and then have consequences later on, but we don't need to worry about those. That's the future. Somebody else's problem. Yeah, exactly. Another question you looked into was powering a house on Mars. Yeah, yeah. So I was trying to think of the different ways to get power on Mars.

And so that's what led me to the tether. I'd heard about space elevators on Mars as a way to get equipment off of the surface, you know, to get rockets because rocket launches are so messy and expensive. And so my idea was so they're going to use these tethers to make it easier to get to space more cheaply. You can move supplies up and down, quickly build space stations. But I was thinking about, well, what if I had a house on Mars and they needed to produce power for it? So I was thinking of all the usual tricks like solar energy, geothermal energy, wind energy. And most of them don't work as well on Mars or don't work at all.

Mars doesn't have plate tectonics. It doesn't, you know, so the geothermal energy isn't easy to get. It doesn't have uranium deposits because those require certain geologic processes to accumulate. And so I was thinking of other weird ways to get power. And I had read about these tethers. And then I started thinking, hey, wait a minute, Mars's air is really thin. but if you get something going really fast, like the end of this tether, maybe you could generate power that way.

I still think it would be better just mail batteries from Earth. But it's a kind of cool idea. Yeah, let's go to the phones. Let's go to Ryan in Jacksonville, Florida. Hi, Ryan. Hey, how are you? Hey, there. Go ahead.

Yeah, I'm a TV producer, a golf producer, and we create videos every year for a series called Is It? drivable and we set out to find if certain things are drivable and this year in may we set out to see if Niagara Falls was drivable with a golf ball hitting it from the Canadian side to the U.S. side. John Daly had tried it way back in 2005 and failed and because there's a lot of elements with hitting a golf ball through the mist and the wind and a lot of variables and this year we successfully did it. We got the world's longest driver Maurice Allen, and he hit it over on the fourth attempt.

So it was quite fun to orchestrate it. Is that from the Canadian side over to the American side by the American Falls or the horse show? Correct. Yeah. So we kind of had to close down the U.S. side landing area, and we had to build a platform on the other side. And, you know, it was – Wow. One day we started and the weather was too bad.

He couldn't even attempt, and the mist was just so thick, but it was a lot of fun. And so, yeah, we enjoyed that. Okay, thanks for calling. Yeah. Well, one of my favorite things about doing how-to was I would be sitting there trying to come up with an idea, and I would think that's too ridiculous to work. And then I would go out and research it and discover that someone had actually tried it. So I had a chapter on how to cross a river.

And, you know, of course, there's the obvious, you could take a boat, if there's a boat, you could take a bridge, if there's a bridge. And I started thinking, okay, what if you don't have those things? What are some other ways you could cross? And one of the ideas I came up with was using a kite. You know, you fly a kite up into the air, and then if you have a big enough kite, you can climb the string. And so you just get across the other side, and then maybe, I don't know, cut some holes in the kite or something and have it so that it starts fluttering down and land on the other side. And I thought that was pretty ridiculous.

But then I looked it up, and apparently when they were bridging Niagara Falls with a bridge back in the 1800s, they had the canyon. The canyon was too wide to shoot an arrow across the normal way because it's really quite wide. So normally they would shoot an arrow over towing a cable and then have that pull a longer cable. And that's how they'd get the first pieces of rope across and then use those to construct the bridge. And so what they did instead was they ended up holding a kite flying competition where they had kids on either side, try to fly kites and crash them on the other side. And then they could use the kite string to get the bridge started. And after a few days of trying, a kid I think named Homan Walsh ended up winning that competition by crossing the river.

He didn't cross himself, but with his kite string using this technique that I thought was useless. Like, I was just thinking of it as a fun exercise. But it actually worked. Like, I'm always surprised when ideas I think are bad turn out to have an actual practical application. I'm proud to say I'm one of the few people who have ever walked on Niagara Falls when it was dried up. in 19 the American Falls in 1970. Oh, that hasn't done that. Oh, wow.

And I was, I was a reporter, WBFO, and went out and looked over the edge on the dry rock. Oh, that's really cool. I've seen a couple of pictures from that, but yeah, there's the urban legend that people think they turn the falls off at night, which they don't. And no, they've been running continually since then, so I've never had a chance to see that. They take a lot of the water out during the winter because I'm following this, Mike Waters and I, from NPR. are. We tried to throw a barrel over the American Falls, and there was so little water going over, he just got stuck on that dry size. Man, if you were trying to go over to the falls in a barrel, that would be so stressful. You're just sitting there bobbing, like, well, am I going to go over now?

How about now? All right, we got some phone calls. Let's go to them. Let's go to Tim in O'Clair, Wisconsin. Hi, Tim. Hi. So these are some thought experiments that I also thoroughly enjoy. Mine tend to be more for social problems. I figured out world peace. and then the one that actually has a technical aspect is how to stop school shootings. RFID chip interlocks on firearms, all new firearms. Eventually, the ones without them become only in the hands of collectors. And then schools have RFID blockers, so guns can't fire.

Randall, any thoughts on that? One of the thing, I mean, one thing I try to do in these situations is always look to research. research and see, like, have there been studies on this? And this is, you know, this is a, you know, this is an area where, where I don't, I, I, I don't have a lot of studies. I don't know. But that's, that would be my criteria is like, have, has this been tried somewhere? Does it work? You know, and I feel like this about a lot of the, the solutions people suggest for this is like, I don't really know if it's a good idea or not. And, and sometimes you can figure out, figure it out from theory. And sometimes you, you have to try. it and maybe things that seem like good ideas turn out to have problems you didn't expect, or vice versa. So I would say if these have been tried somewhere and we can see, does it have an effect or not? You know, it turns it from a theoretical, political argument to more of an empirical question. So I guess I'm always in favor of checking things with scientific research.

I think something that you did do in the book, I'm trying to figure out because it looked so common, is you mentioned how you could charge your cell phone when you don't have an outlet by putting a little generator in the water fountain. Like a little generator that's water powered. Did you actually do that? No, well, so I figured Niagara Falls, you know, these big dams will generate power. And so could you do the same thing in your inside? Like if you're in a mall or an airport and you've got to charge your phone and can't find an outlet. But the, and this was another place where I thought it was kind of silly, but it would be fun to do the math and show why it's silly, you know, and then learn something about power.

And what I learned again was that it wasn't quite as ridiculous as I thought, that you can, if you can really clamp onto a faucet of some kind and use the water pressure to drive a little turbine, you can generate a reasonable amount of power. You know, not enough to run a big generator that would power a neighborhood like a dam, but you could charge a phone. And in fact, they actually did this in the period when there was a lot of running water reaching people's houses, but they weren't all electrified yet. The magazines had ads for these gadgets, these magneto hydrodynamos or something. You know, they had some name. But it was a thing you attached to your faucet and use it to power the lights in your house. And I thought that was really funny. I had no idea.

someone who's actually done that. Somebody's always doing something. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Randall Monroe, author of How to Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real World Problems. Do we have some absurd people on the phones? Let's try that. Let's go to this line.

Let's go to Ellen in Nevada City, California. Hi, Ellen, from Nevada City. Howdy? And I'm delighted to be talking with you. and I certainly hope, Randall, that you're going to take these ideas to classrooms. Do you have a question for it? It would be wonderful to have kids get enthusiastic about the way to solve problems. But I do have a question for you.

And that is, how would you measure the terminal velocity of hailstones? Oh, man. So in physics, we love things like hailstones, because in physics, you always want to make. make everything as abstract and idealized as possible. And so the physicists like to assume that everything is a sphere and everything is frictionless because it makes all the equations simpler. But hailstones are kind of these like frictionless spheres. It's very idealized.

So you can sit down with theory and figure out using this drag equation what the terminal velocity of a hailstone is. And because there's such, you know, smooth round objects, like I feel, I think the match is pretty good. But if you want to check, because maybe it's not, maybe there's some other factor, I think the way they'll often do that is they put them in a what's like a wind tunnel, but point it upward. And so you drop something in, and then you turn up the wind coming out of the ground going upward, and you see how fast it has to go before the hailstone lifts into the air and hovers. And then you can adjust the speed of the fan until the hailstone sits perfectly still,

and then you measure how fast the air is flowing by, and that tells you its terminal velocity. It's like that skydiving event they have, right? Yeah, yeah. Those look so much fun. Never tried one of those. Is there something you would like to try, but you haven't been able to, or something that is beyond your grasp at the moment that you can't figure out an absurd scientific idea? Or is there nothing there?

Well, I did a chapter on how to do. take a selfie and and I find I find uh and I find uh and I think photography's really interesting yeah yeah you had something you had to stretch your arm so far away that you yeah yeah you know and I kind of use the term selfie loosely I feel like any people start using people have started using it to mean any photograph of yourself you know even if the camera is off of you know on a tripod or something um and so I was kind of loose about it but I figured what I was thinking was it's really fun to try to take the photos if you can get one of those cameras that can zoom in really far

where you're standing in front of the sun or the moon, you know, if you're going to do the sun, you've got to use a lot of filters and stuff. But, you know, where you'll see someone standing in front of the moon and the moon looks really big behind them. And the way you do that is by having someone stand on a hill really far away

and you have to wait until the moon is lined up with them. And that's how they get those really dramatic photos of the sun or the moon setting behind like the New York City skyline. To get those photos, it's not that the moon is bigger that day or anything. You don't need a super moon. You just need to go out onto a mountain in New Jersey and line everything up right.

Randall, Randall, have you ever heard of Photoshop? Yeah, yeah, that's a lot easier. But come on, you've got to, then you have the good story. You're like, here's this photo, and here's what I had to do to get it. Just me getting arrested as I went out to somebody's property. Well, I've always wanted to try doing one of those with Jupiter or Venus. Okay. I think it's possible, but I've never seen anyone do it.

Report back when you can. Randall Monroe, author of How, How, Two, absurd scientific advice for common real world problems. Great book. Nice to talk with you again. Oh, thank you so much. No, it was a lot of fun. And you can read an excerpt of his book on our website at science friday.com slash how-to.

BJ Leaterman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of the program, you can, you know, we're on social media all week long. And we want to hear your voice on Science Friday. We have a new app to help us do that. The app is called Science Friday Voxpop. Let's you easily record and share your voice comments with us. We have a question. We'd like you to answer.

an upcoming episode of our Degrees of Change Climate Series. How much do you consider the environmental impact of your fashion or your clothing choices? Tell us what you think on the Science Friday Voxpop app. You might hear your comment in the air. How much do you consider the environmental impact of your fashion or clothing choices? Download our Science Friday Voxpop app, and we'll hear your comments and possibly hear them on the air. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato in New York.