Science Friday - Science At The Oscars, Finding Shackleton’s “Endurance” Ship. March 3, 2023, Part 1

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

Insulin Maker Eli Lilly Finally Caps The Drug’s Cost In 1923, drug manufacturer Eli Lilly became the first company to commercialize insulin. Since then, its cost has skyrocketed. But this week, the company announced that it is capping the cost of insulin at $35. This comes as a huge relief to many Americans, since insulin has become the face of pharmaceutical price gouging. Over the last 20 years, the price of insulin has grown by six times, making this essential, life-saving drug unaffordable to many who need it. Purbita Saha, deputy editor at Popular Science, joins Ira to talk about this announcement and other science news of the week. They chat about a new at-home test for COVID-19 and the flu, how the bird flu outbreak is faring, what we learned from NASA’s DART mission, and why scientists are growing a mushroom computer.   It’s Spacetime And Science Season At The Oscars The Academy Awards are almost upon us, airing March 12. Movie buffs may have already seen many of the nominated films. But for science geeks, there’s another form of criteria for what films go on the top of their watchlist: Do these movies include science? This year, a whole bunch of Oscar nominees are driven by science as part of the plot. The Best Picture category has three: the multiverses in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the water-based society in “Avatar: The Way of Water,” and the gravity-defying aerial stunts in “Top Gun: Maverick.” The Documentary Feature Film category is also ripe for science analysis: “Fire of Love” follows the love story between two French volcanologists, “All That Breathes” follows brothers who run a bird hospital in Delhi, and “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” spotlights Nan Goldin’s advocacy against the opioid-creating Sackler family. Ira is joined by Sonia Epstein, curator of science and technology at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York, to discuss these films and more—including science-oriented films that were snubbed from this years’ awards.   The Lasting Allure Of Shackleton’s ‘Endurance’ There are few stories about heroic survival equal to Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic rescue of his crew, which turned disaster into triumph. In August of 1914, 28 men set sail from England to the South Pole. Led by Shackleton himself, the group hoped to be the first to cross Antarctica by foot. However, their ship, the Endurance, became stuck in ice. It sank to the bottom of the frigid Antarctic waters, leaving most of the men stranded on a cold, desolate ice floe. Shackleton, with five of his crew, set out in a small boat to bring help from hundreds of miles away. Finally, after many months of fighting the cold, frostbite and angry seas, Shackleton was able to rescue all his men with no loss of life. Over the years, there have been many attempts to find the Endurance shipwreck. None were successful until a year ago, when the wreck was located for the first time since it sank back in 1915. Ira is joined by Mensun Bound, maritime archeologist and the director of exploration on the mission that found the Endurance. His new book, The Ship Beneath the Ice, is out now.   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 Iroflato. Later in the hour, why the discovery of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton's ship is worrisome. And our picks for must-see science-based Oscar nominees. But first, U.S. drug manufacturer Eli Lilly is capping the cost of insulin at $35. This comes as a huge relief to many Americans, since insulin has become the face of pharma price gouging. Over the last decade, its price has grown by $6.5.00. six times, making this essential life-saving drug unaffordable to many who need it. Here with more details and other science news of the week, including a mushroom computer. This is Perbita Saha, Deputy Editor at Popular Science-based in New York. Welcome back to Science Friday. Hi, everyone. Happy Friday. Happy Friday to you. All right, Perbita, let's get right into this.

How much will the price drop by? Yeah, this is important news for millions of diabetes patients. So Eli Lilly just announced that for some varieties of the insulin it makes, there will be a 70% price drop. So we're looking at a $35 out-of-pocket cost for certain forms of insulin. And we're talking about the kind that's in the vial and you use the syringe to draw it out. So far, Eli Lilly has not announced a price drop on insulin pens just yet, but for the generic and non-generic varieties, Starting May 1st, there will be a big discount. And while this is happening, the new price of insulin is still more expensive than other countries, correct?

Yes, this has been an issue in the U.S. for a while. Funny enough, we're coming up on the 100-year anniversary of insulin being patented. But because there are only three companies, really, that are producing insulin in the U.S., they kind of run the prices. And I know a while back, Congress authorized a $35 per month cap, but that turned out to only apply for seniors on Medicare. So this will help more people. Yes.

There are 7 to 8 million people in the U.S. who require insulin on a day-to-day basis. And in the past year, there have been studies that have showed that almost 16% of those insulin users have had to ration it because the prices are so high. I mean, insulin's not very expensive to make, so we shouldn't have to be paying so much for this life-saving drug. Then if the companies actually lower the prices, then more and more people will have accessibility. And, yeah, they don't have to go without a drug that they need to survive. Let's move on to some other interesting health news.

And I'm talking about the FDA approving an at-home test that'll test for both COVID- And the flu sounds pretty helpful. Tell us about that. Yeah, it's a very simple test, not too different from the at-home COVID test we've been using for the past year or two. So it's another nasal swab, so fun, fun for our nasal passages. It sort of works in the same way in that it detects RNA, both from the coronavirus and from influenza A and B, which are the two major strains that we've been seeing recently. Is this a government giveaway like the original COVID test kits or are we going to have to buy this one? Unfortunately, not going to be for free. And it's not available at pharmacies just yet. So the FDA has authorized it, which means it can be mass produced, but there will probably be a slight lag. So we're not sure when we'll be seeing it for sale just yet in the U.S. Canada already has it. And for there, it goes for $70 a box. Wow.

But hopefully by the time the next flu and COVID season rolls around next winter, we will be able to access it. One can hope. Speaking of contagious diseases, if you're wondering why you need a second mortgage to buy a dozen eggs, it's because the avian flu is roaring on, right? How bad is the outbreak among birds? Yeah, I don't think a lot of people know how much of the country has been affected by avian flu in the past year beyond the price of eggs and the price of chicken meat. The avian flu outbreak has been going on for a year now. The first cases were seen in North America last February. And since then, 49 states in 921 counties in the U.S.

have been hit. So that is 29 percent of the country just in the past year. Wow. Wow. I'm sure the question on everyone's mind is, can I get it from these birds? Have there been of people catching it? So experts have been tightly monitoring any avian flu cases in wild birds, domestic birds, and they are seeing spillover in mammals and really weird varieties of mammals. So we're seeing grizzly bears, foxes, minks, and even marine mammals like seals and one case of a bottlenose dolphin. So there is some transmission happening between waterfowl and other animals.

luckily, there have not been many humans affected, unlike the outbreak in 2014 and 2015. So there's the idea that it's not as dangerous or transmissible among humans. There was one case of a man in Colorado who was in a prison and working amongst poultry. He did recover, luckily. And there was a 11-year-old child who died of avian flu in Cambodia last week, but she had, a much different stream. It's not the same stream that's spreading here in North America, and it's been endemic to her local village for quite some time now. So we don't need to worry about this just yet in humans, but it's important for us to take precautions. So if you have a chicken

flock, if you have a duck flock, use some of the advice that the USDA gives in terms of protecting yourself and your family. If you see a sick bird out there, don't handle it yourself. Call an expert. Yeah, yeah. Good. Good. advice. Okay, let's move on to some galactic news. If you remember back in September, NASA crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid to see if they could redirect its course. And the data has been trickling in. Perbita, what have we learned in those months? Honestly, Dart has been one of the most exciting space moments in the past year for me, which is to say a lot because it's been an exciting year on space. And the excitement keeps coming. So,

This week, we had five new studies looking at the results from the DART mission, which went down in September. And basically, it was a huge success, like way more of a success than the astronomers behind the mission could have even guessed. Really? So in total, the collision between the spacecraft and the asteroid caused the asteroid to slow down by an estimated 30 minutes in its orbit, which is a lot slower than we expected. And I understand that one study looked at the crash itself and the rocks flying around and such, and there was something surprising there going on. Yeah, so I have this image seared into my brain from watching the collision in real time, dart just getting closer and closer to this rocky asteroid until it just gives it this slight nudge.

But that slight nudge had a lot of power, and it shook off all this rubble from the asteroid's face, which astronomers call ejecta. And what the study found is that the ejecta itself had a lot of kinetic energy captured in it. And when it came off of the asteroid, it transferred that energy to the asteroid, slowing it down even further. So it looks like the DART spacecraft

got a huge assist from the asteroid, which sort of led to its own downfall. That's cool. So hopefully if an asteroid comes barreling towards the, Earth. It sounds like we might be pretty well prepared to redirect it. We might be, yes. It's important to note that dimorphis, the asteroid we hit, was 7 million miles away from Earth. But if something, if a giant space rock was coming straight at us, if we had enough time to plan ahead and enough time to build a much bigger spacecraft than Dart, we could save ourselves. These analyses show that

planning is key here and planning out years and months ahead. Yeah, can give us enough time. Coming back down to Earth, now there's news on the computer front, and I find this to be really cool. It's not a regular old computer. It's a mushroom computer. I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around a mushroom computer because I took a look of what it looks like. Well, you describe it. Yeah, you might not have heard this story yet, and I'm sorry if it gives you nightmares. But my colleague at Popsize Charlotte Hu recently interviewed a computer scientist at the University of West of England. So what he does is he actually hooks up mushrooms to electrodes to understand if we can program them to send certain communication messages. And he's also incorporating them into motherboards and computer chips.

So you're actually talking about a lab that grows oyster mushrooms on top of motherboards, which is really neat. And if you saw the last of us, you know, TV series and picture that growing on top of a motherboard, that's what it looks like. Why fungal networks? Why? What's the serious part about this? So we know that mushrooms are extremely powerful communicators. They produce these networks with their mycelium, their root structures. that have been lovingly called the Wood Wide Web. And they don't just incorporate other mushrooms in these networks.

They incorporate all the organisms around them, including bacteria, what's living in the soil, the trees above them. And it is a very powerful network. We don't exactly know what they're communicating. But what we know is that it truly sustains entire natural systems and can have a positive symbiotic benefit on any creatures living around. the mushrooms. So adapting this to computers, we can say that maybe that will help humans as well. Can we understand what mushroom computers might do that regular ones cannot? So what the lab has done is it uses electrodes to stimulate the mushrooms and produce different responses. So essentially, the mushrooms could take the place of transistors and other parts in a computer

that relay messages and relay electrical connections. It's kind of like how our neurons work with each other. When they send a signal between them, they create both the communication and they create memory. And memory is really important to computers as well. So if we can use mushrooms or other biological systems, this is being tested in a lot of different things. Cambucha, slime molds, even human organelles.

we can create these biocomputers that are just way more efficient and powerful than the computers we have. And this is a constant pursuit for humans to create the best possible computer that we can. Perbita, thank you for bringing us such interesting topics this week. Yeah, that was so fun to talk about. Thank you, Ira. Perbita Saha, deputy editor at Popular Science. We have to take a break. And when we come back, the leader of the team that discovered Ernest Shackleton's lost ship, the endurance, and why he's concerned about what comes next. Stay with us. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flato. There are few stories about heroic survival equal to Ernest Shackleton's daring rescue of his entire crew that turned disaster into triumph. In August of 1914, 28 men set sail from England to Antarctica, led by Shackleton. They had hoped to be the first to cross the isolated continent by foot. However, their ship, the endurance, became stuck in the ice, was crushed, sank to the bottom of the frigid Antarctic waters, leaving most of the men stranded on cold, desolate land. Shackleton, with five of his crew, set out in a small boat to bring help from hundreds of miles away, and finally, after many months of fighting the cold, frostbite, and the angry seas, Shackleton was able to rescue all of his men with no loss of life. Over the years, there have been attempts to

the endurance shipwreck, but none were successful until literally a year ago when the endurance was located for the first time since it sank back in 1915. Menson Bound is a maritime archaeologist, director of exploration on the mission that found the ship, an author of the ship beneath the ice. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Ira. Glad to be with you. Nice to have you. Let's talk about your personal history with the story of Shackleton. You wrote that you grew up on the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic and that everyone in my generation was a shackleton enthusiast and you joined a crew of like-minded shackleton nerds on your ship. You're right. We are a joyous bag of wunks on the ship, all card-carrying shackleton fanatics.

Tell me more about this crew. Okay. I mean, at one level, we were a bunch of wanks. You're right. But, you know, we're also a bunch of very highly trained minds. I suppose in some respects you might compare this whole grand exercise to finding the endurance as the Manhattan Project or the Moonshot or the Human Genome Project, by which I mean you had a group of technical specialists and very, very highly trained minds all brought together to crack this problem. How do we find Shackleton's endurance? Yeah. And it took you two missions to find it, right? Yeah, we had a go in 2019, and that wasn't a success at all. That was a disaster. We were using

AUVs, autonomous underwater vehicles, and our main search vehicle just disappeared without trace. And it was easily the worst moment of my life. And why did it take so long to find the wreck after all? The main challenge was the ice, not so much the depth. It doesn't really matter too much whether we're looking at 1,000 meters or 6,000 meters. But the ice was quite a challenge, especially in 2019. It was really aggressive. It was thick, old, multi-year ice is tough as teak.

And it was really sort of you could feel the pressure. It was like you're in the coils of boa constrictor. And towards the end there, winter was coming on. The ice was getting more and more muscular. and in the end, we lost the vehicle and we spent three days charging around trying to find it. But in the end, the ice became too much. We had to get our tails out of there. So what did you do differently the second time in 2022?

Yeah, we learned a few lessons from our failures in 2019. Certainly there was a sea change in our attitude of mind. I can't speak for the others. But I do know this. I went in there sort of feeling quite arrogant about things. I went in there like a bunch of Renaissance Conduceri, sort of trampling all before us, thinking, you know, I can beat the ice. And in the end, it was completely the opposite.

The ice beat us. And, you know, I was completely humiliated and horsewipped by the whole experience. Second time round, the ice was not nearly so bad. I mean, I couldn't believe the change in just three years. Last year, the ice was there, yes. But it was loose, a very, very low. loose matrix, a lot of leads, a lot of breaks in the ice. We just wriggled our way through to the search area of no problem whatsoever. Whereas in 2019, we had to break our way through and yes,

we got caught in the ice not once but three times, but last year it was simplicity itself. And I'm afraid it's part of a trend. The ice is disappearing. But for that to have happened so fast in just three years, I mean, it was great news for us, but just terrible news for the planet. The journey of the endurance was well documented by its crew. You talk about that. They had diaries that told the exact coordinates of the sinking. How far away from those coordinates did you find the wreck? Yeah. Well, I couldn't say they were exact coordinates. I was a guy 10 years ago who was tasked for finding the wreck. And my first job was devising a search area. And I, like everybody else, imagine, that a set of coordinates which had been left by the ship's captain, a man called Frank Worsley, I, like everybody, thought that they were an observed position, by which I mean they were taken using a sextant. In fact, they were nothing of the kind. It was an estimated

position because he wasn't able to get a sight on the sun until the day after she sank. So he estimated his position. He guessed how fast the ice was moving, what direction the ice was moving, and he applied what we call an offset to his position of the next day. But in the end, you know what, he wasn't far wrong. He was just over four nautical miles away from where he said he was, which, you know, all things considered, isn't bad. What was the reaction when the endurance was located? Believe it or not, myself and my friend John Shears were actually out on the ice at the time.

We'd come through a period of really very difficult. weather. Temperatures had dropped to minus 40 and minus 50, which is, this is centigrade, by the way, guys. I think you do Fahrenheit in the States, but this is centigrade. This is seriously dangerous stuff. In my case, it popped some of my fillings. There was one guy there whose eyelids got frozen closed. And the guys on the back deck, they were really, really suffering. And then shortly after 4 o'clock in the afternoon, an image appeared on the sonar cascade in the control booth at the end of the back of the ship and it was clearly something that was man-made and of course the only man-made thing in the center of the Weddell Sea is the endurance so they called in one of the sonar experts a guy called

francois used to be a cold war submarine chaser in the north sea he took one look at it and he said setel it's her a guy called nicco vincent who's in charge of all subsea activities on the ship he's an old friend of mine and he just strode up and he thrusts to his iPhone right into my face and he said, Gents, let me introduce you to the endurance. And on the screen was this perfect little high frequency, high resolution image of the endurance seen from above, perfectly delineated.

And it was just, I don't know, totally explosive. It was that moment. I mean, it was just, I don't quite know what you can liken it to. It was just like sunbursts of just pure undiluted, joy or euphoria. Let's talk about the condition of the endurance when you finally saw it. I know you specialize in diving on shipwrecks. You've seen a lot of them. What condition was the endurance in? Yeah, you're right. I've seen a lot of shipwrecks in my time as all I've ever done my entire adult life. And I think I'm safe in saying I've probably seen more deep ocean shipwrecks and

wooden shipwrecks than anybody I've ever met. in my profession. And usually deep ocean wooden shipwrecks have broken up from impact. But when we launched this project back in 2018, it would have been, I did make four predictions. This is at the Royal Geographical Society in London. I said that she'd be upright. I said that she'd be well proud of the seabed. I couldn't see any reason why she should be absorbed by the mud. And I knew that if she was sinking and dragging all those broken sails and masks behind her, that they would impose a drag on the fallen ship, so she'd go down and keel first.

And I also said that she'd be three-dimensionally intact. I was going out on a limb there, but I did say that the greater probability was that she'd be three-dimentially intact rather than broken open, simply because we'd found her construction details at an archive in Norway. and she was at the time said to be the second best, well the second strongest non-naval,

wooden-built ship in the world. When I looked at those plans, I realized if ever there was a ship that could withstand the impact of the seabird, then it was the endurance. I said she'd probably be three-dimensionally intact. And then I said she'd be in an excellent state of preservation. And there I knew I was pretty safe,

because there are no wood-consuming marine parasites in the Weddle Sea. I mean, yes, there's always bacterial degeneration. There's always chemical decay and mechanical decay. But the main things which destroy wooden shipwrecks are shipworm, tornado worms. They are to wooden ships, what Death Watch beetles are to timber frame houses or moths to cardigans, something like that. But we didn't have any of those in the Weddell Sea. And sure enough, when we saw her for the first time, I just couldn't believe it. You could see her paint work.

it was as if, as the captain said, Captain Oge Bengals said, it was if somebody just kind of laid her out on the seabed and just said, wait, wait until you're discovered. Yeah, you're right that water is a surprisingly good preservative, and how deep it was where the lack of oxygen was there. And the cold. And the cold, it looked like the day it went down. It looked.

You can count the ship's fastenings, I wrote. It was just unbelievable. I've never, ever seen the shipwreck as bold, as beautiful, as together, it's the endurance. You also write that if you were asked to choose what, for me, was the most uber awesome moment of the archaeological inspection dive, I would without any hesitation say it was when I found myself staring down three rough-cut holes through the main deck. Why were those holes so important? Oh, yeah, right. So yeah, we only did two dives on the ship, believe it or not.

The first one was to secure the data, and the second was the archaeological dive. And this is when we're going to see the ship for the first time in real time, looking through the cameras on the vehicle at it, and we approached them the stern, but then went up and over the stern and along the deck. And as we're going along the deck, one of the French guys, the guy called Jim, said to me, look, ice damage. But I knew exactly what they were from the deck. the diarists. And I said to Jim, I said, no, it was an ice damage. Those are the holes which saved

their lives. Because when they left the ship, they didn't have very much at all in the way of supplies with them. It was all down in the Tweedex area. And they very quickly realized once they left the ship, they didn't have enough to sustain them. Yes, there were seals and they were penguins, but with winter coming on, you know, those seals and penguins have become more and more sparse. So they suddenly realized they were in trouble. And it was the photographer. a guy called Hurley, who realized that maybe, just maybe, they could actually cut a hole through the deck of the ship. And he knew where a lot of the supplies were. So that's what they did. At over two days, they extracted three tons of food. And it was that food which saved

their lives. When Bob Ballard, who discovered the Titanic was on our show years ago, he said that he was sorry that the exact location of the Titanic had been published as it led to a great commercialization of the site, which he believed to be a graveyard that should be respected, and he hated that people were scavenging, recovering objects from a graveyard. What are your feelings about bringing up the endurance or preserving it or anything about the future of it? I share Bob's feelings. In fact, I haven't said this before, but what happened to the Titanic and his personal upset what happened to the Titanic

was one of the reasons that why we were so anxious to find the endurance. I mean, the endurance search was 10 years in the making. It was myself and a friend of mine. In fact, it was my friend

who came up with the idea 10 years ago in 2012. And I knew that the time would come when she would be found. And I was anxious that she not be turned into this sort of help yourself

wreck site, which is what pretty much happened to the Titanic. It sort of became a bit of a smash and grab afterwards, and Bob really had no control over the Mayan that followed. And I and my colleagues were very concerned that, you know, it'd be found

by a responsible body with archaeological objectives and that it'd be protected quickly. So, yeah, I mean, I've read Bob's books and I sympathize with him completely. So what what will happen? Do you think that people will scavenge the endurance? Well, not everybody would agree with me, but from a lifetime of experience of shipwrecks, I know this, that when they're found,

I mean, right now it is protected by the ice and the cold, but this year alone, we had one ship right over the wreck in January, and we'll see that on the satellites and the Falklands. The way the ice is disappearing, that protection will soon be gone. So it's a huge, huge worry. It really is. I mean, I had some bitter experiences of having seen what happened to wrecks. I remember after the first wreck I ever excavated ship off the Tuscan Island of Gile off northwest Italy. When I finished that job, the superintendency of archaeology for Tuscany told me about a new wreck which should be found, a medieval ship, absolutely intact and perfect. for various reasons, maybe because I was young and a bit ignorant, I didn't think it was that important.

I thought if it wasn't Roman or Greek, then it didn't have archaeological significance. And I turned that wreck down. And several years later, when I smartened up, I went back with my wife. We looked at that wreck again. And in the five years between when the superintendent of archaeology took us there, and when we saw it again, it had been completely erased. All that was left was just this brown stuff. in the sand. So, you know, I could tell other stories like that. So I worry about this a lot. But, you know, right now it's safe. We have some very responsible organizations, in particular,

the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust. We have other archaeological organizations within England, which are putting together a protection plan. So she's in good hands. I have no plans to go back, nor does the Fortland's Maritime Heritage Trust. I want to end this interview talking about the saga of Shackleton's journey. You weave it throughout the book, and at the end of your story, you're standing next to his grave on South Georgia Island. And you're right, he could have reached the poll. He could have claimed a prize, but he did not. He got to within a hundred miles of it. Why did he not do it? He didn't do it because he knew that if he did on the way back, men would die. And that is who Shackleton was. Here, besides his grave, it occurs to me that in all Shackleton's

expeditions into danger, which he himself led. The only life he lost was his own. A fitting epitaph, do you think, Benson? Yeah, especially when you read it. Yeah, that's precisely how I feel. He was a remarkable man. He could have reached out and claimed the prize, the discovery of the South Pole, but he got to, what was it, 97 miles of pole, and he stopped. And he stopped. And he stopped. because he knew that on the way back, men would die. And indeed, we know it would have happened because on the way back, they had to leave a couple of the men behind

and make a dash to the ship to get help. And then Shackleton turned around and went back with the relieving party to pick up his men where he had left them. In other words, Shackleton could have made that last dash to the pole, and he would have got back himself alive. But certainly, those two guys, they would have died. Menson Bound, thank you for taking time to be with us today.

It's a great pleasure. Benson Bound, a maritime archaeologist and director of exploration on the mission that found the endurance. His new book, The Ship Beneath the Ice, is on sale now. I highly recommend it. After the break, looking ahead to the Oscars, this year a whole bunch of Oscar nominees are being driven by science as part of the plot. We'll highlight it for you. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. The Academy Awards are just a few days away, March 12th, and that means it's time for a sci-fry to go back to the movies. You're a Tokun. You saved my life. Thank you. Every possibility. At the same exact time, commanding the infinite knowledge and power of the multiverse.

Morning, aviators. This is your captain speaking. Welcome to basic fighter maneuvers. If you're a film buff, you may have already seen a bunch of the nominated features. But for science geeks like myself, I have an additional criteria for what movies go on the top of my watch list. And that is, do these movies have some science in them? And it turns out that this year, a whole bunch of Oscar nominees have a plot driven by science, at least in part. Joining me to talk through these movies you might want to catch up on is a fellow,

science film follower, Sonia Epstein, curator of science and technology at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Let's start right at the top, right? Some of the nominees for Best Picture, a big frontrunner in the category is a mind-bending multiverse movie called Everything Everywhere All at Once. Tell us about the science in this movie. I will do my best. Yeah, so everything everywhere all once it has 11 nominations this year. So I'm sure we'll be seeing it win in at least a few categories. But as you said, you know, this film is definitely based in the theoretical idea of the multiverse. The way to explain that in a more grounded way or a way that's grounded more in provable real

science, as one might say, is a quantum superposition, which maybe someone on your program has talked about before. And those listeners can go back and listen to a real scientist to talk about what that is. But essentially you can see it if you're watching the film, not only in sort of the parallel storytelling strands that the filmmakers lead you through, but also in sort of what they say as a random arrangement of particles in a vibrating superposition. That's actually like a quote from the film.

And you see that at a certain point where, you know, one of the characters is holding something and it's constantly changing forms. And that actually becomes the sort of superpower in the film. It takes a while to catch. on what's going on. And you have to stick with it. But at least the writers or the directors, every once in a while will try to remind you what's going on about the multiverse, right? Yeah. They'll describe it for you. I think my favorite part of the way that, you know,

science is woven into the story is, you know, it's as this sort of narrative storytelling device. And there's certainly like a computerized video game type way that the characters in the film interact with the multiverse and that they can grab, you know, powers, so to speak, or, you know, special talents they've developed in other strands of their lives. But I think at the root of it, you know, for folks who've seen the film, they understand it's really sort of a family drama. And a lot of what I think the writer-directors are exploring is not only the principles of physics, but also how physics makes you feel.

And there's something that the characters in the film speak to about, why should we care if there's all these, you know, if there's all these strands happening all at once. So I think that to me is the most interesting way that the film interweaves it. But yes, it's, you know, very much falls in the category of a science multiverse kind of film. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about the sequels this year. The Best Picture category is full of sequels, including Avatar, the way of water.

What's the science in this one? Water, Avatar, both? I would say both. I would also say very much the science or technology of making the film. But to start at the top, so avatar, you have the idea of an avatar. And I don't think anybody would argue that that is happening in the real world. But you do have things like brain computer intervace, you know, developments that neuroscientists are making in people's ability, you know, through an implant to interact with something outside of themselves. And that's sort of the idea of an avatar. in the film. There's also the idea for folks who've seen the film, and I think it was in the first one, too, of these amplification suits. I think they're called amp suits in the films, and those are, that's sort of like an Iron Man suit, you know, something that you pilot from a cockpit, but it's much bigger than you. And that is certainly, you know, based in some real world technology that, um, DARPA and the Army is developing, you know, these sort of exoskeletons that,

you know, for combat purposes. With so much special effects built into this and CGI, you may, you wonder what's the next thing that they're going to try. I mean, they already have films that squirt water at you and the seats are shaking. 4D. Yeah, 4D. And speaking of pilots, let's go to our next best picture nominee that we're going to talk about. That was a big crowd pleaser. And I'm talking about Chop Gun Maverick. And while this movie was a bit more down to Earth than the last ones we've talked about, there were some incredible aerial stunts done by Tom Cruise and cast. I felt like I was going to get motion sickness at some point. Totally. I thought those scenes were so fun to watch. I mean, I'm not proud of this, but I did

watch this film on an airplane, which in some ways, I think, mirrors the cinema experience of watching something communally, but obviously on a very small screen. But it did, you know, being in a plane watching him do all those things just made me. No fear factor that you're in the plane. Exactly. Yeah. But yes, this film, a lot of physics. I mean, there's, for those who follow the sort of, you know, physics, science tweets about this. There's certainly some speculation about some of what's portrayed in the film, Tom Cruise going at Mach 10 and would he really survive being ejected from the cockpit at that speed. But, you know, it gets into what mock is, you know, the speed relative to sound and, you know,

the G-force and that sort of G-force induced physiological loss of consciousness, all those things, I think pilots would definitely relate to. Yeah, you know, it's, as Johnny Carson used to say about a joke, if you buy the premise, you buy the bit. So if you buy the premise, you can eject from a plane at Mach 10, you got to believe you can survive it, right? Another film nominated, let's move on for a few awards, including costume design, visual effects, best supporting actress is Black Panther, Wakanda Forever. Now, I remember in the first movie, there was a lot of tech. Is that the same case for this film? Even more so.

I'll admit, this is my favorite science film pick. Similar to a lot of superhero movies. I'm thinking of Superman, you know, even Dune. There's an element that gives the Wakandans, this East African nation, their power in the Black Panther series, and that's called Vibranium. And, yeah, this film starts with the sort of. of premise of the United States. More nations should be given access to this from a, you know, security perspective.

Wakanda can't be the only nation. And then the tension in the film comes when it's discovered that, in fact, they are not the only nation. So I won't give anything away. But I think there's no, no, no, no, no. Well, it happens very early in the film. Similarly, you know, similarly actually to Avatar, this is another film where, you know, there's sort of a big water element.

but also, yeah, I just think Vibranium has a lot to say about, you know, real world global economy and how it's at this moment very dependent on rare earth metals that are often the cause of geopolitical tensions like lithium and etc. Let's move on to another category with a lot of science films, and I'm talking about documentary feature film. Let's start with one that we've talked about on Science Friday a few months ago, Fire of Love, which is a about volcanologists. Yes, definitely a crowd pleaser, Sarados' fire of love. This is a film that is purely composed of archival footage

of two married volcanologists, Maurice and Katia Kraft, who were very active in France and really sort of pioneers in the use of film to study what was happening with volcanoes and the different types of explosions and also used film as a tool to help communicate the impacts of their research.

So, for example, to warn people of the dangers of volcanic explosions and volcanoes and to, you know, pressure governments to create more standard evacuation procedures and warning systems. So it's unlike a film that one has ever seen before. A lovely film. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Another documentary we talked about on Science Friday is called All That Breeds. And briefly, give us the science on. this story. Sure. So this is a really interesting story of two Muslim brothers in New Delhi who start a bird hospital. And it's a bird hospital specifically for a type of bird called the black kite that is a carnivorous bird. And the reason why there has to be a hospital dedicated to this bird is Hindu society as a vegetarian society. And these birds, as I said, are carnivorous. And so veterinary hospitals, the predominant veterinary hospitals that are run by Hindu people won't

treat these birds. And so there's a kindship formed between these Muslim brothers and the birds and they develop this specific veterinary hospital for them. So in that way, the film, you know, you see a lot of the birds, a lot of, you know, the care that the brothers give to them, a lot of the medical procedures that they do. And I think in a lot of ways it's sort of a comment on our relationship to non-human animals and to nature and to the, you know, close ways that we live, especially in cities with animals. Absolutely. Another documentary on the list is called All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,

which is at a way about the opioid crisis. Yes. So this film by Laura Poitris is in a lot of ways a documentary and sort of a biopic about the artist Nan Golden, but it is very much framed by the organization that she started, which is called Pain, which stands for prescription addiction intervention now. And that was a project that she began in 2017, specifically targeted at the pharmaceutical developers, the Sacklers, who developed and marketed OxyContin.

And the film takes a look at her, both, you know, at addiction and the actions that she and her organization have taken in protest against the Sacklers. Yeah, there have been a couple of films. a film and a TV series about the Sacklers. Yes, dopesick, one of my favorite TV series. I would say for anyone who, you know, really, I mean, it's a horrifying story. So it's not to be lighthearted about it by any means. But the series is really, I thought, fantastic and gets into what was so nefarious about specifically, you know, the marketing of that drug.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We're talking about this year's Oscar nominations that focus on science with my guest, Sonia Epstein, curator of science and technology at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York. So we've made a way through the sciencey nominees. I want to talk now about the 2022 films that were snubbed by the Oscars. Always. Starting with one of my favorite films of the year, Nope. We talked about that a few months ago, but give us a refresher. Sure. So, I mean, also one of my favorite films, Nope is by Jordan Peel, sort of a, it was marketed as a horror film. I didn't think it was as, you know, it was had definitely bits of all sorts of genres, comedies. It was sort of a Western.

Yeah. And yeah, the science in that film, I mean, it definitely has to do with aliens. So things that are real and not, but I know what you covered on the show previously, which I thought was a great. story had to do with really the development and the depiction of the alien presence in the film and how it was inspired by real-life sea creatures. So that in particular, I thought, was, yeah, really innovative use of science and storytelling. Yeah, yeah, you know, we were talking about sea creatures there and even an octopus, because the alien would hide itself in a cloud like octopuses do when they hide among rocks, so you can't really see it. Totally. Yeah, yeah. So the film is, you know, sort of based on there being this unidentified object and this family trying

to track it down. And they use a lot of technology and, you know, filmmaking in the process. And certainly the history of film is very much also a part of that, which is one of the reasons why I left it. Go see it. Go see it. Even though it was snubbed. Another very interesting movie that got snubbed is called Crimes of the Future. And this one is about eating plastic. Yeah. Yes. Fill us in on that. Sure. David Cronenberg, he's, I think, you know, maybe a little bit too out there for the Oscar mainstream, but certainly one of my favorite directors. It's a film that I think falls into the category of body horror, but essentially presents a world in which humans, a subset of humans has evolved to digest plastic. And there's, you know, some organs have as a result changed. And surgery figures very heavily into the film, these kind of performative surgeries. The human, the human, the human, the human. human body is changing and it's sort of a result of climate change in the world and the proliferation specifically of plastics, which I think is very true. I mean, maybe not that the human body

is changing, but maybe it is. I think there's also been some research on that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we certainly are consuming a lot of plastic, tiny little pieces. Yeah, microplastics, totally. There's, there's, I think, I know that, you know, he has an interest in that. So I imagine it came from a real place. All right. Let's talk about the last movie that got snubbed that we're going to to talk about. It's called Apollo 10 and a half. Not Apollo 9 or 11 or 10. 10 and a half. It's an animated film, right? Yes. Yes. So this generated some, you know, pre-Oscar nomination controversy because it is a film by Richard Linklater that's made through a technology called rotoscoping that he would argue it counts as animation. But initially, the Oscar gatekeepers

argued that it wasn't. There's, it's a, it's a, it's a, New technology, there's been an Amazon Prime television series called Undone that was filmed in the same way. But essentially, it looks animated, but it's done with real life actors. And so they said that he wasn't eligible and he argued back. And ultimately, they let it in as a consideration, but it wasn't nominated. But the 10 and a half, it's a great premise. It's set in the year that the Moon mission took place, 1968. It's sort of, you know, a look at Texas during this time.

and the premise is that NASA sort of messed up in their calculations and built a spaceship that was only big enough for a child. And so they secretly send a child to the moon before Apollo 11. And that is the premise. So it's a very sweet film. You can see it on Netflix. Wow, that does sound really cool. I missed that. I'm going to have to catch that.

Yeah, yeah. Sonia, always a pleasure to talk film with you. Same here, Ira. Thank you so much. Sonia Epstein, a curator of science and technology at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York. Here is Sandy Roberts with some of the folks who help make this show happen. Thanks, Ira. Nehima Ahmed is our manager of impact strategy.

Beth Rami is our controller. Jordan Smudjik and Jason Rosenberg are our grants managers. Melissa Mayers is our office manager. And I'm Sandy Roberts, education program manager. Thanks for listening. Thank you, Sandy. BJ Leatherman composed our theme music, of course, if you missed any part of the program, or you would like to hear it again, subscribe

to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. We're active all week on social media, but of course, if you'd like to contact us directly the old-fashioned way, yes, our address, SciFri at Science Friday.com. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.