Science Friday - Science In Space, Sports and COVID, Science Diction. July 31, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: July 31, 2020

Astronauts have conducted all sorts of experiments in the International Space Station—from observations of microgravity on the human to body to growing space lettuce. But recently, cosmonauts bioengineered human cartilage cells into 3D structures aboard the station, using a device that utilizes magnetic levitation.  The results were recently published in the journal Science Advances. Electrical engineer Utkan Demirci and stem cell biologist Alysson Muotri what removing gravity can reveal about basic biological questions, and how you design experiments to run in space.  Major League Baseball’s season opened to great fanfare last week, amid the pandemic. But 18 players and staff of the Miami Marlins have already tested positive for COVID-19—forcing the team to pause their season until at least next week. Meanwhile, the NBA has quarantined their entire roster in a bubble in the Magic Kingdom in Florida.  Sports reporter Ben Cohen and epidemiologist Zachary Binney talk about the strategies and effectiveness of different leagues as competitive sports attempt to make a COVID-19 comeback.  Ketchup has long been central to American culture. We use it in hot dogs, burgers, fries—and the list goes on. But have you ever wondered why we even call it ‘ketchup,’ or where the condiment came from?   It turns out there are many words related to food—like restaurant, umami, and “rocky road”—that have an interesting science backstory. To trace the origins of these words, Science Friday’s word nerd Johanna Mayer joins John Dankosky to talk about the origins of the word ketchup, and the new season of her podcast ‘Science Diction.’ As American pharmaceutical company Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate entered Phase 3 of human clinical trials this week—an important step in what is still an early phase of its development—Russia claims a vaccine of its own will be approved for use as soon as mid-August, prompting safety concerns. But questions about vaccines extend far beyond who is first. What happens next for the people around the world waiting for protection from the pandemic? As Science Magazine reports, rich nations have placed hundreds of millions of advance orders for successful vaccines, while poorer countries worry that there will be little left for everyone else. Maggie Koerth, senior science reporter for FiveThirtyEight, discusses this story and more news from the week, including the discovery of 100-million-year-old microbes living beneath the ocean floor.   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 John Dankoski. Ira is on vacation this week. Later this hour, we'll talk about new experiments in biology aboard the International Space Station, plus how sports teams are managing their COVID-19 risk. But first, another chapter in the story of the coveted COVID-19 vaccine. Here in the U.S., pharmaceutical company, Mederina, began the third and longest phase of human trials this week, which will assess a candidate vaccine for both safety and effectiveness. But scientists in Russia are also working on a vaccine candidate, and this week it was reported that Russian officials hoped to roll out that vaccine as soon as August 10th. Here with more on that story, plus other short subjects in science, is my guest, Maggie Kerth,

a senior science writer for 538. She joins me from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Welcome back to the show, Maggie. Hi, thanks for having me. Timelines are optimistic if they say we're going to get a new vaccine by sometime next year, So how are Russian scientists saying they're already ready to distribute one in less than two weeks? Well, all of the vaccines that are far ahead in this process are sort of built on the framework of existing vaccines. That one that is going into phase three trials this week in the U.S. is based on a preexisting vaccine for MERS and the RS. mers related to the COVID virus. And the same thing is true of this Russian vaccine. But one of the ways that they are getting around this is by kind of skipping some of the steps in the testing process. So right now this vaccine is in phase two trials. It's not actually done with phase two trials yet.

And they're planning on running the third phase at the same time that they're broadly distributing it to frontline health care workers. So this is something where a lot of scientists are expressing some concerns about the actual safety and efficacy of this vaccine. And at the same time, they haven't made any of the scientific data publicly available yet. It's not been up for peer review. It's not been released to the scientific community in any way. They're saying that that's something that's going to happen soon, but it hasn't happened yet. So Russian officials are calling this their Sputnik moment, which of course is kind of referencing the idea that they're surprising us and beating us to the punch. But there's a lot of questions about whether

it's a good idea that they're doing that or not. It seems as though it might not be a good idea, but let's get to the Sputnik moment for a second here. I mean, is it right to characterize this race as a new kind of space race between Russia and the U.S.? Well, it could be. Yeah. You know, this is a really strange world for vaccines right now. It's not typical. for these things to have this kind of political aspect that they seem to be having. Russia has already been accused of trying to hack databases in the U.S. and other countries to steal vaccine secrets. Science had a really great story this week on vaccine nationalism. So you have all of these wealthy countries that are already developing private deals with vaccine manufacturers

and kind of buying up all of the orders of these vaccines. that don't even exist yet in advance, and it's starting to kind of stoke fears that low-risk average Joe's in the U.S. and Europe are going to get vaccinated long before frontline health care workers can in poorer countries. So there are all of these different ways that the vaccine race is becoming political. And this, you know, these Russian officials talking about this as a Sputnik moment is just one aspect of that. Hey, real quick, before we move out this subject, I'm wondering if we can talk more about what we might do to make sure that whatever vaccine comes out of this from Russia, US, or wherever gets to poorer countries where it's really going to be needed.

There are programs that are supposed to be doing this, and different groups are trying to get countries to sign on to it, but they're having a lot of resistance. And it's something that is really a concern because we've seen similar problems play out with AIDS drugs in the past. You know, it is a issue where when there's a serious problem, the rich countries just don't necessarily want to share. So let's move to a different note here. Researchers have found some microbes at the very bottom of the ocean.

Microbes that it turns out are pretty old. Okay, how old are they, Maggie? Oh my God, this is so cool. Okay. So scientists drilled these cores of seafloor sediment out of the south. Pacific, you know, thousands of feet below the surface of the ocean. And they extracted bacteria from this clay and muck. And they got these bacteria, which were hunkered down seemingly dead in sediments 100 million years old to start growing and dividing again.

That's amazing. Yeah. Do they know how they got there in the first place? Well, these are probably bacteria that got trapped in sediment as it was forming, you know, hundreds of millions of years ago. And they are oxygen-dependent species, but they've been living in this environment that is extremely low oxygen. They're basically surviving on this tiny amount of oxygen isotopes that are diffusing through the seabed from deep below. There's very little food for them to eat. So basically, this is a confirmation that bacteria are even more hearty than we had already guessed. You know, we know they can live in these very hot environments. We know, they can live in very cold. And now we know they can live without much food or energy for

eons, even though they need it. So scientists don't know what the bacteria were doing down there all this time. They may have been slowly dividing or just frozen in time. And they represent a diverse group of species and subspecies. You know, it's not just one particular organism. Basically, life finds a way. Is there something big that we can learn about our planet or basic biology, think, from finding these microbes way at the bottom of the ocean? It tells us something very important about the tenacity of life and where life can live and what it can do. And this is definitely one of the first times you've been able to wake up something this old.

And that matters for understanding of how biology works and what we might be able to find, you know, maybe even on Mars, hint, hint about a future story. Speaking of Mars, very nice segue there, Maggie. You know, NASA's Perseverance Rover launched yesterday morning. And so if all goes well, it'll be joining Curiosity on Mars sometime in February. Seems like pretty exciting times for planetary science. Yeah. And over at Science News, reporter Lisa Grossman had this really interesting story about how the

scientists prepped for that mission. So back in February, the seven scientists were walking around the Nevada desert, essentially cosplaying as the rover, so that they could give its instruments a trial run before launch. Perseverance is the most ambitious mission to Mars that we've had, and it's scheduled to take 20 samples of Martian rocks, store them, prepare them for return to Earth. It's supposed to do all that in its first two years. That's nothing we've ever done before in the past. And the with rovers. And so the scientists really wanted to make sure these tools worked and that they could send back the information that we wanted them to be able to send. So they had this off-site team scattered all over the world, pretending to be, you know, mission control on Earth. And then these

scientists were carrying around the handheld versions of Perseverance's tools and following the commands of mission control to make sure that everything operated the way it's supposed to operate. I think one of the best things about this launch yesterday is that I don't know about you, but it's kind of nice to look forward to something happening potentially in February. There might be some good news. It might be something to look forward to that has nothing to do with any of the stuff happening on Earth. Right. It would be really great to watch a landing in February and have that kind of communal experience.

You know, the last times we've had rovers land. people got really excited and they were actually, you know, people sort of turning out to watch this thing communally. Well, I guess we won't be able to do that exactly anymore. But being able to have a shared experience seems really nice right about now. Yeah, let's look forward to maybe being a little bit more communal than we are right now. Yeah. But, well, let's turn to one last story here and some revelations that were news to me. First news that the Pentagon has an office for investigating UFOs.

And it now has a new report coming out soon. So tell us about this. The New York Times is reporting that these records from a Senate committee report that happened last month have been released and are showing that the secretive Pentagon UFO investigation program that was supposedly scrapped years ago is still an operation. Instead of being shut down, it was renamed and transferred over to the Naval Intelligence Office. So now it's called the Unidentified Aerial Phnomon Task Force. which is a lot. And its goal is to basically standardize collectionary reporting on sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles.

So if you think about like those grainy cockpit videos you might have seen in the last couple of years where you've had F-16s like spotting these strange ships in the sky and what is more, according to this committee report, the task force is set to report at least some of its findings to the public within 180 days of the passage of the Intelligence Authorization Act. So this task force began in 2007. It was supposed to have been shut down in 2012, but rumors have been circulating for years that it's still up and running. And technically, it's not really looking for little green people. What it's actually looking for is evidence that other countries have developed high-checked aircraft that they're using in our airspace,

or at least that's what's officially doing. Some of its fans, which include former Senator Harry Reid, really are hoping that it's going to find evidence of alien dissertation. And there are, you know, astronomers, they're astrobiologists, there are like all of these people involved as scientists contractors who are working with this team and like trying to understand what's going on. So how seriously should we take that piece of it? Obviously, there's a military interest in figuring out whether or not other countries are flying over the U.S. with weird new vehicles. But how seriously should we take this search for Little Green Men, as you put it? I think it's important to kind of have these sort of groups that are looking into those

kind of things because having some transparency to that, having, you know, it not just be a thing that people tell you they don't want you to know about is, I think, valuable. And so getting these reports out there, having some of this information coming out, I guess, hypothetically relatively soon. You know, I think that that is, that's useful and it's bound to be interesting. I guess it gives us something else to look forward to. Yeah. We're out of time.

Thanks so much to Maggie Kerth, a senior science writer for 538 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Thanks, Maggie. After the break, we'll talk about some new twists on the many science experiments aboard the International Space Station, stem cells, homegrown human cartilage, and other biology in space. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Astronauts have conducted all sorts of experiments in the International Space Station,

from observations of microgravity on the human body to growing space lettuce. But recently, cosmonauts assembled human cartilage using magnetic levitation, and other scientists are sending up stem cells to learn about basic biology, using the ISS as a kind of space laboratory. story. My guests are here to talk about that. Utcon de Mercy is co-director of the Canary Center at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection at Stanford University's School of Medicine. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Also with us is Allison Muatry, a professor of pediatrics and cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, California. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. And Allison, I'll start with you. Since we can culture tissues and conduct experiments right here on Earth, why send something into space? What can space teach us? Growing tissue here on Earth is not something easy because we don't fully understand the embryonic oranges of tissues. So we find ways to do it, but most likely not exactly how nature would do it. For example, we use artificial matrices to place layers of cells. Nature will probably put it in a very different way that we don't fully understand.

So sometimes gravity is a bummer here on Earth. So the ability to grow that in microgravity at a national space station take it away these factors that we cannot fully control. So, Oudcon, how about from your perspective, how can the space environment help to answer some basic biology questions? Gravity is like, you know, trying to talk to a friend in a noisy environment. You're trying to kind of get the message across, like the cells are trying to interact and talk to each other.

And when you study science and try to see what cells are trying to communicate with each other, there is this big noise of gravity, which is, you know, which is there, which shapes everything that we have. It kind of makes our muscles strong, gives us really strong bones. But when you want to study different diseases and their interactions and understand things in absence of that noise, That actually is possible in the outer space to better develop new directions in maybe developing new drugs, testing new things that could then turn around and come and be very useful on Earth. So maybe you could give us some specific examples. Give us something that helps us understand a little bit better about how space helps you do science. For instance, you want to study the interaction of two types of cells in the human body.

The human body has billions of cells. They are interacting with each other. They are talking to each other. And the first and the most strongest thing that they see is their interaction with the plastic, paparidish bottom rather than just each other. When you levitate these cells, even on space or in space, you start losing that effect. And that actually gives you a chance to better observe how these cells talk to each other. And you see a lot of changes in these cells at the molecular level, at the cellular level, as they interact in these different environments.

They become a different being. So, Alison, you study brain development, and you recently sent a stem cell experiment up to the ISS. Maybe you can tell us about that. What were you looking for? Yeah, so we have different questions with these experiments. One of them is really to see how human brain development we do in microgravity. and this is important for understanding the impact of microgravity, radiation in brain cells. This will help astronauts to better develop neurological models here on Earth.

The other idea to see if we can speed aging, so we know that stem cells, when they are in space, they kind of become suspended on their aging process. And when you bring them back, they have what we call accelerated aging. And this is all related how the telomeres, the chromosomes, keep the cells ennesting. So we are taking advantage of that to see if you can model diseases of later onset, for example, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's. These are conditions that you only see the clinical phenotype really late in life. So perhaps this would be an opportunity for us to create these better models.

So actually using the accelerated aging to your benefit in terms of your studies? That's correct. That's exactly the point. So, Utcon, I'd like to turn back to you. You designed a device that allowed cosmonauts to manipulate cells in space, and it's a bit different from the experiment we just heard about. You use magnetic levitation. Now, this is something we may have heard about in trains here on Earth. But how is it used in this particular case?

Sure. 3D bioprinting of cells to build more complex tissues, more complex, even maybe in the future organ systems that we could use has been a dream. And it has been a hot area in the past decade. All the printers that we have on Earth send a droplet or send a toothpaste-type extract of cells to the surface and leverage the Earth's gravity to build multiple layers of cells. And we want to build these multiple layers because everything in human body is 3D. So cells behave very differently when it's in 3D,

talking to everyone around them versus just on 2. in Patriot dishes like we do in the lab. So the 3D brings a completely new biology. That's why we want to do bioprinting. But since there is no gravity, poor Earth's bioprinters lack the ability to work up in the space. That's why we bring magnetic levitation, which we can even do on Earth space to levitate cells

and balance the weight of the cells, which we don't have to do in space, but it's easier to do. And we use these magnetic ways, is if you're looking at pebbles on a beach that is being reorganized by the water waves coming onto the beach. And we are using the same magnetic ways to kind of organize cells like pebbles so that we can make 3D constructs like spheroids of these cells so that they can have these tissue mimicking type structures up in the space using this levitation tool. And, you know, you can use this to make cells to study biology. Or you can use it also even to make, you know, stakes out of it, whatever you would like to apply it to.

So the cells themselves, when they're in an environment like this, are they clinging to each other as though they're magnetic in some way? I mean, are they finding each other and then adhering? How does it work? So we do a little trick there that we might, you know, I don't want to go into too much of the details of the magnetism, but cells by themselves, you know, everything in life is magnetic. you know, cells are diamagnetic, and we make the environment a little bit paramagnetic, so when you apply the magnetic field, cells clank together. Otherwise, they would be just like, you know, all over the place, just, you know, flying as they will.

But we kind of create that environment so that, you know, that's the part that makes it a 3D control printing, that they come close to each other and form sphero. Or you can make other structures as well. Utcon, the other piece of this is on Earth, when you're constructing tissue, You need some sort of a scaffold, something for the cells to cling to. But you don't need that in space. Talk a bit more about that, if you would. Sure.

You know, there's been wonderful science over the past two, three decades, using different hydrochal, cool biomaterials so that we can get the cells to penetrate those materials and they become complex tissues. But the key problem has been always to kind of match that high density of cells that we can see, for instance, in cardiac tissue. You see cell clinging right. next to a cell and maybe like 20 microns, which is like one-fifth of a hair, ticking of a single hair away, like all blood vessels running.

So that's kind of so complex and so neat in architecture that when you bring in scaffolding, cells get distributed and separated from each other. They cannot talk to each other because they really have to, you know, look after this, or figure out this biology. So when you take out the scaffolds and still bring them by using either magnetic waves or acoustic ways, that eliminates the separation between the cells and just brings them side by side, get to them to talk to each other sooner and get to that biology sooner. So that's the benefit of, you know, building scaffold-free environments for biological questions. So, Alison, I know that you said

that you'd be really happy to get your hands on this technology. Is this something that you can use in some of the work that you're doing? Yeah, I think so. There are some ideas that we have to, for example, vascularize our brain organoids. Right now, it's a mass of cells, brain cells, and there is a limitation on how much we can grow them because they are not vascularized. So adding vascularization with this technology seems like a great opportunity to improve our model. And when you say organoids, just explain to our listeners what we're talking about. What's an organoid? Oh yeah, sorry. Organoids are three-dimensional structural. is made of stem cells that mimics the tissue in question.

So there are organoids for brain, for liver, for pancreas. In my case, we work with a brain organoid. How do you think differently about designing an experiment or a device that's going to be used in space than one that you would use on Earth? I mean, what's the thought process like? What problems do you have to solve differently? Well, people levitated in 80s living frogs, for instance, that are using these superconducting liquid, helium, liquid, nitrogen, cool systems that cost maybe millions

and they are the size of my house. So that would be really hard to take it up on the space. So it has to be so simple, like it has to be maybe like an on-chip system, like the size of your business card, light for sure, because you're going to put it as a payload. It has to be rugged so that it just doesn't, you know, break when you're talking. touch it and it has to be so simple, so easy to operate, and it has to be something that it will work every time so that we have actually perfected the engineering of it, that you know the principles, so that what you built is so strong that it can endure space travel.

Alison, I'm wondering how you translate some of your results that you get in space to results that can be used here on Earth, because it sounds as though you're able to work in such a unique environment and an amazing environment in space to do this research. How does it translate once you get back to Earth and it's bummer gravity? Yeah. Yeah, I think there are two pieces. One is the biology. I mean, learning new biology with the system. The example I mentioned about senescence or cellular aging, it's a good one. I mean, we have a big problem here on Earth to study these latent set disorders like dementia, because we're not. We have to wait for the cells to age 50, 60 years, until we see phenotype.

And that's not doable. That's why we don't have good models for those conditions. So the aging part, I think, is going to be fantastic for the neurological side of the disorders. It would be definitely a new model. And then there is the engineer part, which is also something very exciting. I mean, we are learning that we can do it, first of all, in a fully automated way. so there is no human error present in there. By optimizing these boxes, we can also reduce cost.

So to the point that we now can grow like two or three times more of these organoids with the same type of materials and costs than we used to do like two, three years ago. So I think this is a huge advantage. And is I stepped forward for personalized medicine? Now we don't need to create one model that's features. it's all, we can actually create organoids for every individual person and take advantage of the individual genetic background when we model the condition. I'm John Dankowski, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So how difficult is it to get these experiments into space right now, Allison? Are

there companies popping up that are sending these experiments all the time? Yeah, we work with partners that takes care of the logistics and also the engineer part. I mean, our partner, You know, Space Tangle, we have a long-time collaboration with them, the ability to send more experiments, more than n-equals-1 experiments. Because in the past, I think people like me were not enthusiastic about space because we don't have, like, rockets taking materials to the space station all the time. I think nowadays it's a different story. I mean, we have rockets going there every month, if not twice a month.

So allows you to do, to repeat the experience. and be more confident on the reproducibility of the data that you have. I think this is a new era on the use of the space station for this kind of biological experiments. Good Khan, would you like to pick up on that? Sure. I think we are now imagining, you know, to push the frontiers of space. It's I guess not the last, but the next frontier, meaning people are starting to think about long distance travel to Mars and other options.

So that comes with its requirements of understanding the space biology for long-term travel and how human body would endure. For instance, we know the immune system weakens in space over time. And the bacteria, the gut bacteria that sits in your gut so comfortably on Earth starts becoming an issue because the immune system is kind of going down. So understanding all these changes of how the human immune system behaves under different conditions and all that biology, we also bring understanding to the way we look at things, diseases, viruses on Earth.

And going back to that, because it brings a whole new need of new types of mass production of food and other things on space, which goes to the next level of how we live and continue survival up in the space or over long times of space travel. I guess those are the things that will be enabled by this type of repeated experimentation, asking the right questions and having the right hypotheses so that we build that science,

so we can design for maybe going to other places in the future. Before I run out of time with both of you, I'd love to know what other space projects you're working on, Utkan. We use the same printer to print other types of tissues, as well as it was used to print meat a couple months ago to feed the astronauts something different than just to try spaghetti. How does it taste? I didn't try it, so I won't comment. I think we'll probably want to review before we try one of your stakes. Allison, how about you?

What's next for you in space? Yeah, I mean, this is fascinating what Lucas is doing. So we also are very interesting on how the brain develops in the absence or almost absence of gravity. And this is important for space colonization. So it's interesting that I read so many science fiction books and watch movies, and people talk about space colonization. But nobody really figured out if humans can actually reproduce in that space. And what we are seeing is that the way the brain form, at least our preliminary data,

is very different in microgravity. So you don't want to get pregnant in the space station. There's a lot of really interesting things that you're working on, and I'm sure you'll be working on even more as more of these experiments go into space. I want to thank Alison Muayotry, who's a professor of pediatrics and cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, California. Thank you so much, sir. Thank you.

My pleasure. And thanks also to Utcon Demerese, who's co-director of the Canary Center at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection at Stanford University's School of Medicine. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. After the break, we'll check in to see how the NBA, Major League Baseball, and other sports leagues are planning to play or not play during this pandemic. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski sitting in for Ira Flato this week.

Major League Baseball season opened last week amid the pandemic with fake crowd noise, fake fans, but real players. That opening day enthusiasm, however, was dampened a bit when as many as 18 players and other members of the Miami Marlins team tested positive for COVID-19, forcing them to pause their season until at least next week. Every sports league is coming up with plans for how to play during the pandemic, and they're taking very different approaches. The NHL is playing in hub cities, and the NBA? it's in a kind of magic kingdom bubble. So how effective are these strategies, and what can we learn from them? My next guests are here to talk about that. Ben Cohen is a sports reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

He's based in New York. Welcome, Ben. Hi, thanks for having me. And Zachary Benny is an epidemiologist who studies sports injuries. He's an assistant professor at Oxford College of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Hi, Zachary. Hi, thanks for having me. Of course.

And, well, let me start with you, Ben. the baseball and basketball leagues have two very, very different approaches for how they're handling players. Maybe you can line out these different strategies for us. Well, it's remarkable how different they are given that they were handed a similar version of the same problem, which is how do you continue to play professional sports through a pandemic? The NBA built a bubble in Walt Disney World. They have 22 teams, thousands of people inside this protected environment in a state that was really burning with coronavirus when they all moved down. And so far, It appears to be working. They have been there for about three weeks, and there have been zero cases of coronavirus inside the bubble.

Baseball took a different approach. They are playing games in home stadiums without fans, but traveling from city to city. And they didn't even make it a week out of the season before they had an outbreak on a team with 18 players on the Marlins testing positive and games postponed and, you know, the schedule thrown into chaos already. Why exactly did they choose these very different approaches? I mean, what's behind these differences? There are lots of reasons. You know, one is that basketball is a really tough sport to play during a pandemic with an infectious disease that happens to be a respiratory illness, right? It's played indoors. It's high contact. It's crowded. You really can't go from city to city, whereas baseball is outdoors and it's fairly socially distant. The other thing is that there are labor issues behind this. The NBA, the owners and the players split their revenues and they have a more harmonious relationship than Major League Baseball and its players unions, which has been involved in some real labor strife over the last few years. So it has to do with the sport. It has to do with the economics of the sports and also what they were each trying to achieve. Basketball is really trying to

finish a playoffs and baseball is trying to sneak a whole season into a very short amount of time. Yeah, Ben, I look at this and I think, is this all just for show? It's seems to me as though some people are just putting on masks because they were told we should probably wear masks. Yeah, the question is, is this viral security theater, right? And that's also a question of what is happening inside the NBA bubble, because they're all wearing masks everywhere they go. They're not allowed to play, you know, doubles ping pong. And yet for two and a half hours every few days, they are, you know, screaming and sweating on each other on the basketball court indoors. So I think there is a question about that. But there's a real difference between the two leagues

in terms of testing protocols as well. I mean, you know, NBA players are being tested every day and they are getting results back basically overnight, which there are moral questions about that, but there's really no question that it is an effective testing protocol. Baseball, the players are moving around from city to city. They're being tested every other day. They're waiting 48 hours for their results,

and they're playing every day. They are always behind their tests. And so, you know, we've seen basketball is this more controlled environment where it's going to be much harder for the virus to get in. And yet they are testing more and they're getting their results back faster than baseball, which is basically out in the community. It's a very odd dissonance that I think all of us who follows sports are trying to wrap our minds around. I do want to add just one thing about, you know, some of these regulations may seem ridiculous on the surface,

like the NFL, the players really revolted against you can't have post-game jersey exchanges. But the other thing that we know about this virus is the dose, matters. So the more time you spend around somebody, the more likely not only that you are going to get infected, but that you may be getting infected severely. So, you know, anything that you can do to reduce that contact time, I think is important as part of a broader integrated plan. Will it make a big difference? No, but I mean you layer enough of those small differences on top of each other and eventually you have something. So you've got a bubble plan that a few leagues are using right now. And you have the Major League Baseball plan, which is essentially no bubble, you're just flying around and you're

playing baseball games, but without any fans and having some precautions. The NHL, Ben, is doing something a little different, right? So they've got hub cities, and they're trying to do it in a, I guess, a kind of a blended way. But they're basically a bubble. It's essentially two bubbles. And this divide between whether or not to bubble is really the question that every sports league is trying to answer. So it's not just the NBA and the NHL. You have to be a lot. You have Major League Soccer. You have the National Women's Soccer League, which just finished a month-long tournament in Utah using a bubble. And then on the other side, you have baseball, and much more important. You have the NFL and you have college football. And what this country does

with football over the next month or two, I think, is really the next great frontier in how sports deals with this pandemic. Because the NFL is the most popular sports league in America. And college football is this constellation of 120 schools, basically making their own decisions while trying to figure out whether they can bring students back to campus as well. It is a logistical nightmare, and it is kind of playing out that way. Yeah, Zach, what would you suggest as people try to design football seasons if there's going to be football seasons for the NFL and for college football? You're seeing bubble plans work in the U.S. Ben outlined the ones that have worked. You're seeing non-bubble plans where players and staff live at home with their families interacting with

the community. You've seen them work in countries like Germany and South Korea and even Spain and Italy, which had a very rough start to the pandemic, but have since gotten their cases under control. In the U.S., we very much do not have the virus under control. And so you see non-bubble plans failing in the case of the outbreak on the Marlins. And also, I would add, in major league soccer, before they entered the bubble. They had two big outbreaks start on Dallas and Nashville. So you have seen over and over again now non-bubble plans fail and bubble plans succeed. And maybe that's the only way you can succeed in the U.S. So what would I recommend for the NFL? If they can revisit it and it may be too late, they may have done the best they can, but I would really love to see what I call home market

bubbles. Meaning, for example, the dolphins would book two hotels in Miami. The players and staff stay in the hotel, the training facility, and the stadium. They don't go elsewhere. They don't have contacts outside that NFL group. And when you travel to another city, you're going bubble to bubble and really restricting that outside of the league contact. I don't see a way that college football can do anything like that. You can't establish a bubble on a college campus. When you think about a bubble plan for NFL, which probably they should do, like logic suggests they should do that. There are all types of drawbacks, you're asking players and coaches to be outside their families for months at a time. These are real sacrifices that they would have to make. Now, granted, they're still making millions

of dollars and this is what they do for a living. But you can imagine why players would not exactly be lining up to move into a hotel for four months. So, Zachary, there's probably going to be more outbreaks. We'll probably see more instances where something happens. How are teams or leagues determining when things are going to get shut down? I mean, the protocols in place to essentially say, we're done here. We can't have this team or we can't have this league play anymore for the rest of the season. Well, I think that's the million dollar question. And unfortunately, we've seen that MLB with the Marlins outbreak, I would have expected these were questions they'd settled weeks ago internally, even if they weren't talking about it publicly.

But the fact that it took them a couple days to really decide what to do and that they didn't even suspend the Marlins-Fillies game on Sunday after they had four positive tests on one team. a couple day period tells me that they did not have that laid out as a solid plan. Teams have been resistant to drawing a clear red line because there's a lot of intricacies, like the number of cases, how they're distributed across teams, how quickly they come in. I understand the desire to maintain some flexibility when making a decision. But the drawback to that is that you now have to make the decision in kind of this quick, panic mode, maybe not the most qualified people are trying to make these decisions.

and there's a lot of money in play. So it's just human nature to be tempted to push it a little bit further than it should go. And if you have players who are taken out of play, they're put on an injured reserve list in baseball because they have COVID for a certain amount of time. Ben, how are they being replaced? I mean, who's replacing these sick players? There is a taxi squad, is what they're calling it, of essentially minor leaguers who come up and take their spot. It's quite dystopian. But Zach mentioned, I mean, this question of when to shut down. is really the question that everybody is watching in sports as sports return. And Zach and I actually talked a few weeks ago. He had this brilliant idea of essentially outsourcing the tasks to a panel of experts who might be more objective in making a decision, which I love. I mean, I don't think any league is going to do this. But if you were to make the best decision possible, that's probably how you would do it, right, Zach?

Absolutely. I haven't seen any league embrace that. and I completely understand why. But then it leaves you with the potential for an MLB situation where it seemed like they were really scrambling to know the right thing to do. When to me, it was clear. What I've been saying for weeks now, and I actually wrote something up on this, is that if you see three or four cases in rapid succession,

you need to be afraid of an outbreak on your team and shut it down. If you see that happen on multiple teams, that's when you need to start thinking about shutting down the league. A lot of people listening to this show might say, why are you talking about sports? There's so many other important things to talk about. What can we learn from sports about how to really handle this COVID pandemic? Sports are a microcosm of society.

And I think it's instructive to watch how sports is responding to this virus, both good and bad, like still wanting to push for fans in the stands, even when they know that that's a bad idea for public health. But also, you know, you can look at coaches and players and even owners sending good messages about mask wearing. And the fact that, you know, some Southern governors who may have been resistant to that actually came out and said, hey, wear masks so we can have college football. So you can use that maybe as a way in to talk about some important things.

So like it or not, it's something that's here. It's an industry that's trying to deal with COVID-19. And so we got to pay attention to it and learn from it. Zachary Benny is an epidemiologist who studies sports injuries. He's an assistant professor at Oxford College of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and Ben Cohen is a sports reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Thanks so much for joining me. I appreciate it. Absolutely, my pleasure. Thank you.

Catchup has been central to American culture. We use it on our hot dogs, our burgers, our fries, and the list goes on. But do you ever wonder why we call it ketchup or where that word came from? Well, there are many words related to food, like restaurant, umami, and Rocky Road that have an interesting science backstory. And when it comes to tracing back the origins of these words, who better than Cy Fri's resident word nerd Johanna Mayer? She's host of the new Science Diction podcast, and she's here to tell us where ketchup came from. Welcome back, Johanna. Hey, John.

So tell us where did ketchup come from? The thing that I love about the ketchup story is that ketchup seems like the most iconically all-American sauce with a funny name that just, you know, came out of nowhere. But the thing that's really interesting about it is that most historians agree that both the sauce and the word ketchup itself are actually of Chinese origin. So the original ketchup sauce was actually more of a fish sauce, kind of the sort of thing that you would associate with Thai or Vietnamese cuisine. And the word ketchup is actually an old Hokkien word.

And if you break it down, ke means fish and chop means sauce. So ketchup literally meant fish sauce. And it just butcher the pronunciation. but Western sailors then picked up the sauce and the word and brought both of them back to England and the name stuck. I'm John Dankowski, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So the original ketchup didn't have a lot of the stuff in it that we're used to, including tomatoes, right?

No tomatoes in the old ketchup. Not a red-raped tomato in sight in the old ketchup. It was totally unrecognizable. And you know what happens anytime that you introduce a fancy. new imported luxury product, which is knockoffs. And there were all sorts of things in the early westernized ketchup to imitate that kind of deep umami flavor that came from the original fish sauce. So mushrooms were staple for a really long time, oysters, anchovies. There was a version that was really popular for a while with walnuts. And actually Jane Austen's family was supposedly

big fans of that version. And the first time that you see a ketchup recipe, with tomatoes, with the tomatoes that we know and love today, was from 1812. And it was actually called a recipe for love apple catsup because they used to call tomatoes love apples back then. And I don't know why, but I wish that that stuck because I love that name. Love apple catsup. And again, it's catsup, not ketchup. That's a different way to pronounce the word. Is it a different word altogether? It is not. It's just because you know, ketchup, the old Hokkien word, that doesn't use the Roman alphabet. So when these Western sailors show up and hear this word, they had to kind of figure out

just sort of make up how to spell it. So ketchup and cats up are two different versions of that. Gotcha. And so it didn't really taste like the ketchup that we know today. It didn't have some of the same ingredients. I'm sure it looked probably a little bit different. I mean, if you if you tipped over the jar, it probably didn't run out very slowly like the Heinz ketchup were used to, right? I don't think there's any thumping of the ketchup jar involved for a while. It was totally unrecognized. used to be super runny, brownish, and it spoiled easily. And so here's another interesting facet of the ketchup story, which is that ketchup spoiled really easily and food regulation at the time was just like not a thing.

There were all sorts of kind of nasty preservatives stuffed into food. And the chief chemist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture decided to run this set of experiments to see if food additives were safe, which, spoiler, many of them. were not. So this group of men who were doing this experiment were called the Poison Squad. And they actually ate meals laced with these different preservatives like borax and formaldehyde, and one in particular that was used widely in all food production, but also in ketchup. And it turned out that there were really nasty side effects when they were eating these preservatives that were used in ketchup. So one very prominent ketchup maker happened to be paying attention

into these experiments. And his name was Henry J. Heinz, and you've probably heard of him. And on the heels of these experiments, he decided to get rid of that preservative, make some tweaks to the recipe, and that resulted in the thick, bright red ketchup that we know and love and squeeze onto every hot dog today. That is so interesting. So, okay, what other words in this podcast are you going to take a look at other than ketchup? We're going to talk about Rocky Road, the ice cream, the word umami, and something and that I've been thinking about a lot lately, a missing restaurant. Oh, those are good words. I can't wait. So where can people find this podcast, Yonna? You can subscribe to Science Diction wherever you get your podcasts, and you can learn more at

Science Friday.com slash science diction. Thanks so much. Johanna Mayer is host of Science Diction. Really appreciate it. Thanks, John. Charles Bergquist is our director. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, and Kathleen Davis. Our intern is Atabay Rodriguez Benitez. And on the Science Friday Vox Pop app, have you tried to navigate pregnancy or childbirth during this pandemic? We'd like to know how it went. Were there any unusual hurdles you had to go through or plans that drastically changed? Please tell us about it. That's on the Science Friday Voxpop app, and it's wherever you get your apps. B.J. Leatherman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of our program or you'd like to hear it again, please subscribe to our podcasts. IRA's back next week.

I'm John Dankoski.