Science Friday - SciFri Extra: Revisiting Unique Science Stories Of 2019

Episode Date: January 28, 2020

2020 has just begun, but we’re still celebrating all the amazing work done by science journalists in 2019. Thanks to them, we’ve been informed on stories like the new illnesses linked to vaping, the first image of a black hole, and the increase in youth-led climate change protests. At our year in review event at Caveat in NYC on December 18, 2019, three science storytellers—Arielle Duhaime-Ross, Sarah Zhang, and Ariel Zych—took the stage with a notable story they reported in 2019, including the untold and surprising facts that may not have made it to their final draft. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hi, Ira here. Last month, as we looked back on the year at a live event, we invited some friends to share their memorable reporting stories from 2019, things that maybe didn't make the front pages. Here's what they had to say, recorded December 2019 at Caviot in New York City. Let's take a listen. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato coming to you from the Caviott Theater in New York City. Joining us tonight are three science journalists, reporters, and communicators who have achieved. great things this year, and they have brought with them tonight a story to share about something they reported this year and why it stuck with them. It's a chance for them to tell their tales in a new light from a different perspective or give us an update since they left off. Okay, first up, we have the story of how the world changed forever. This may, but many of you may not have noticed the change at all. That story is the host of Reset, a podcast from

Recode by Vox about how high tech is changing our lives. Please welcome. Ariel Duem Ross. Come on out. Thank you, Ira. And thank you, everybody, for being here tonight. I'm a big fan of obscure scientific dates and anniversaries. And one of my favorite such date is May 20th.

Because May 20th is World Metrology Day. Now, and I do mean metrology, not meteorology, the study of weather. metrology, the study of measurement. And World Metrology Day is a day intended to honor that field. And I would say that 2019 was a pretty big year. I would even argue that it was the biggest for metrologists, because 2019 is the year that the definition of the kilogram was changed forever. Fun fact. And more than that, 2019 was the year that with that change, Metrologists achieved a goal that they had set out for themselves back in the 18th century. See, the slogan for metrology is, at all time, at all people, in French.

I'm French-Canadian, I'm going to milk it every day that I possibly can, so I really like this story. So at all time, at all people, which means for all times, for all people. Basically, metrologists set out to create standards for measuring literally anything, and one of their goals was to make sure that people could access that information anywhere, at any time, any place. And up until this year, up until May 20th, no metrologist could truly claim that they had ever achieved that goal. Now they can.

And so the story that I'm going to tell you today is the story of how that happened. But to do that, we have to go back in time to 18th century France. See, at the time, the world was expanding in the sense that people were traveling further, than I ever had before and there was more and more trade. And that created problems, because it's really hard to talk to someone if you don't know how they measure things. So you might go to a specific nation or a specific village and find out that the rope that you want to buy is measured in surveyors' chains,

which you may or may not know is equal to 66 feet. So that made it really hard to buy and sell things. So the French, during the French Revolution, decided to change that, to fix that. And they did that by creating the international system of units. And you're familiar with this because of the meter, the liter, the kilogram. I know we're in the U.S., but you guys know this stuff. The way that they did that is kind of weird.

The French are a little bit strange, but the way that they did that is I'm going to take the meter first. So they decided that the meter would be a quarter of the circumference of the earth divided by 10 million. That's the original definition of the meter. And then from there, they set the liter. And so you take a meter, you divide it by 10, you get a decimeter, and then you cube it. And then the container that that creates, the virtual container that that creates by cubing a decimeter, you fill that with a liquid.

That's a liter. Then that same container, you fill it with water. You weigh it. That's a kilogram. So that created problems, as I'm sure you can imagine, because water has a different mass depending on the various circumstances that you can be in because of atmospheric pressure, for instance, or the purity of the water. If you don't have pure water, it'll wade differently.

So if you're trying to set a standard, that's a fail right there. To solve that problem, scientists decided to fix these measurements in objects. And so the meter became a specific metal bar. and the kilogram became a metal cylinder. And when I say specific, I mean specific. Like there is an object that exists, that is this kilogram, this metal cylinder. And it was located in France. And that too creates problems.

Because what if the kilogram, the cylinder, is damaged? What if it's broken? What if it's stolen? It was made out of a nice metal. Somebody might want to steal it. What happens then? To fix that, the French decided to put in a vault, and this vault was really hard to get into.

You had to have three people, each with a key, that they turn at the same time, and then you put in a code, and then you can get into the vault. Seriously. That is, that is like a real thing. I know this seems weird, but this kilogram that they put in that vault

is called the Big K, and it has actually impacted. Okay, I didn't know. That wasn't supposed to be a joke. But I'll take it. It's called the Big K. And it has seriously impacted all of our lives, even if you live in the U.S. Because it's not just the kilogram that's used to calibrate your kitchen scale. It's the kilogram that's used to make sure that your plane isn't overweight.

It is the kilogram that's used to make sure that your blood test results are accurate. Every weight for 130 years was calibrated. using a weight that was calibrated, using a weight that was calibrated, using a weight that was ultimately calibrated using that kilogram in the vault in Paris. And so scientists figured that they had done a pretty good job with this, but actually there are problems with that too. Because no matter how hard you try to keep an object pristine, it will change over time. Objects like humans decay, crumble, tarnish, with age. And that was true for the kilogram as well. Scientists estimated that over 130 years, the kilogram

lost the mass equivalent to a single human eyelash. You might not think that's dramatic, but it actually really is. And I will tell you why. See, the cylinder in that vault in Paris is the kilogram. And so technically the kilogram does not change. What changes is the rest of the world. And so over 130 years, everything on earth has become, heavier by a single human eyelash. Trippy, right? This object has the power to alter our entire reality, and it has. And honestly, no metal cylinder should have the power to do that.

So once more, scientists decide, we've got to fix this. The way that they decided to do that was by changing the definitions of these units once more. and they decided to change the definitions to something that doesn't change. In this case, we would be talking about fundamental constants of nature. Features of the universe that don't change no matter where you are, even in space. And the best example that I can give you of this is what they did with the meter. It's the simplest example to explain. They decide, in order to define the meter, they decide to change the definition to something

related to the speed of light, which again does not change no matter where you are, even if you're in space. And so today, and this definition was changed back in the 1990s, by the way, today, the definition of the meter is the distance that light travels in a vacuum over a period of one 300 millionth of a second. That's a meter. And so really, you kind of get a sense for it, right? They're just using something that doesn't change, and they're converting a definition so that it remains fixed in nature, is written in nature. And they did that for every single unit in the international system of unit, except for one, the kilogram.

That took a while. It took scientists from around the world decades to figure out a definition that would work. And to do that, they had to develop an instrument called the kibble balance, which basically allowed them to use quantum dynamics to convert the definition of the kilogram into something that could be defined using a constant, a fundamental constant of nature, called Planck's Constant. Plank's constant is the smallest possible unit of energy you might be able to encounter. And really, I should take more time to explain exactly what they did, but that is actually incredibly difficult to do.

So what I will do instead is tell you that scientists, metrologists specifically, did a ton of math and did a bunch of science, of physics experiments over a period of decades until finally they could define the kilogram using Planck's constant. And the person who explained that to me is a metrologist named Stefan Schlaminger. He was on the US team that helped validate this method. And Stefan is really into this stuff.

He actually has Planck's constant tattooed on his arm. And the way that he, the importance of this to me and the beauty of this to me is he said let's say you encounter aliens this was during an on-camera interview and I was sitting right in front of him in Paris and I had to fix my face the whole time because the last thing that you expect is for a scientist to bring up aliens but it happened so he said let's say you encounter aliens and they ask you how you measure mass because of course that's definitely the first thing that an alien will ask you they ask you how you measure mass.

If you tell them that you measure mass using a cylinder in a vault in Paris, then you can't have a conversation. If you tell them that you measure mass using planets constant, then you are on speaking terms immediately. Aliens, that's how big of a deal this was. Because now you don't need to have friends in high places in order to get you into a vault in Paris to find out how much a kilogram weighs.

now it is written in nature. But just demonstrating that you could define the kilogram in this way wasn't enough. The world had to agree to the change. And to do that, they had to vote on it. The vote took place in Versailles in November 2018. And delegates from more than 60 nations gathered on that day, along with the world's leading metrologists, and I was there too. And the thing that stands out the most to me about this specific conference, this specific gathering, was just how happy these scientists were.

These metrologists were beaming. And honestly, that kind of makes sense to me. I mean, I'm not somebody to sort of necessarily generalize about an entire field in science, but if I was that kind of person, I would say that metrologists are the happiest scientists of any field. And again, I think that makes sense to me because metrology is a weird field. It is the underlying nature of science that governs everything we do. And it's invisible. And it's designed to be that way. It is designed to be invisible. Stefan told me that if you notice metrology, that means it's not working. The way you know it's working is if you don't notice it. And so if you're

the kind of person who has a capacity to fall in love with a science that is intended to be then you're probably going to be really happy, right? Like, everybody else is just trying to like make them feel validated, but they just don't care. They're just out there doing their math, doing their physics, and they're really, really happy. So going back to Versailles, the vote took place in a theater, and I was on the balcony along with the rest of the press. And even though I was sitting pretty far away from the rest of the scientists that day,

I could feel their excitement. I could feel their excitement as delegates from France, Russia, China, the U.S., Canada, each stood up and said yes to the redefinition of the kilogram. Ultimately, the vote was unanimous. And when that was announced, the room erupted in applause. And I saw scientists stand up and hug each other and tear up. And honestly, I teared up too, because how often do you get to see more than 60 nations agree on anything. And how often do you get to see that agreement revolve around a purely scientific

endeavor? One thing that I neglected to tell you at the beginning of this story is that Stefan actually has a second tattoo under Planck's constant. The second tattoo says, at all time, at all people. For all times, for all people. And on November, 2018, the world decided that the kilogram could be defined using a fundamental constant of nature. And as of May 20th, World Metrology today, that became official. And in so doing, metrologists finally met the goal that they had set out for themselves back in the 18th century. Something about that just really gets me.

That's the story that I wanted to tell you guys today. Thank you so much. Thank you. Ariel Doom, Ross. Who knew such a tiny amount of weight? What, the size of an eyelash, a single human eyelash, could change the course of history. And if you haven't heard Ariel's new podcast on a Vox, it's called Reset. It's a great podcast, and I suggest you to take a listen to it. So our first story is done. And I have another peculiar tale coming up about those DNA tests that you may all be getting for the holidays as a gift, right? Here with that is Sarah Zang, staff writer for the Atlantic. Please welcome. Come on out here. Sarah, to the stage. Hello, everyone.

Thank you so much for coming out here tonight. As Iris says, I wanted to tell you the story of a DNA test where something goes really, really unexpected. So I want to introduce you to a woman named Holly Becker. She's in her 40s. She lives in Chicago, and she works in nonprofits. And a couple years ago, she decides to take a DNA test because she's interested in her family history and this is what people do nowadays. So she orders a test from ancestry and she gets the

test and she spits in the tube and those of you who have done it, you know it's actually like a really big tube so you're kind of like sitting there and like spitting for like a pretty long time. So she does this and she sends it off and as expected a few weeks later her results come back. But before she really even has a chance to look at her results, she gets a message from a woman in New York, a stranger, someone she had never met before, never even heard of. And the website is saying that this woman and Holly share 50% of their DNA, which means that genetically, they are mother and daughter. So this is not what you might be thinking it is right now. Holly is not adopted. There was not a mix-up at the fertility clinic, which other DNA tests have actually revealed. And no,

the test is not wrong. Holly really did have this woman's DNA inside her. And that's because it turns out she actually has this woman's son's DNA inside her. And so to explain that, we have to rewind 22 years to 1997 when Holly is 24 years old, and she's working her first job out of college. She has an apartment with her friend in the city, and everything's growing great until she gets sick with a really, really bad case of the flu. You know, but she's like young, she's in her 20s, like it's not a big deal, so she gets better.

But then she gets worse, and she gets worse. She's getting fevers and night sweats, and pretty soon she gets so sick and so weak that she can't even get out of the bed to take a shower. So she's going to doctor after doctor, and they're running test after test. And finally, on Christmas, Eve, 1997, Holly gets her diagnosis. She has stage four non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is a cancer of white blood cells, and stage four means that Holly might be pretty close to dying. And so her doctors get her into treatment right away. She goes to the chemotherapy, and it doesn't

work, and they tinker with some things, and it still doesn't work, and then her doctors suggest a bone marrow transplant. So they test her brother and her sister, and unfortunately neither of them are matches for a transplant. And nobody who is on the registry for bone marrow donors is a match either. So Holly is running out of options, and her doctors suggest something that's pretty experimental. They suggest using a transplant with blood from the umbilical cord. And so this is how it works. First, Holly goes with chemotherapy that kills all of her blood cells, including all of the cancerous ones.

And then she is transfused with her donor's healthy blood stem cells. And these cells have the ability to divide and differentiate and eventually replace all of the blood in her body. So her donor's blood cells become her blood cells. And this is a really grueling and intense and painful months-long process, but it works. and this saves Holly's life. And bloods themselves can come from one of two sources usually. They can come from bone marrow, or they can come from the umbilical cord of a newborn baby.

And so that's where the woman in New York comes back into the story. So in 1994, Dania, that is her name, she gives birth to her son Patrick in a hospital in New York. And amid all this hubbub, she is asked if she will donate his umbilical cord for research. And she says yes, because otherwise it's just going to be tossed away as medical waste. And she says yes and honestly, like, doesn't really think about it anymore because she has a lot of other things going on in her life right now.

So it's not until 25 years later that she logs onto Ancestry.com and sees that there's a stranger named Holly in Chicago when they share 50% of their DNA. So she sends Holly a message. At first, they can't really figure out what's going on either. But then Holly remembers that her donor is from New York. And actually, this is the only thing she knows about her donor. And she had asked her doctor before, and he wouldn't tell her anything else. Because he actually didn't know anything else about her donor either.

And this is actually very deliberate because cord blood donations are supposed to be entirely anonymous. Early on, bioethicists were actually worried that if a patient is facing a life or death and they get really desperate, they might try to find their donor and pressure them to donating blood marrow again. So this obviously didn't happen in this case. But Holly now starts putting two and two together, right? Her donor is from New York. Danya is from New York. Danya's son is her donor. It means his blood now runs through her veins.

And this is the reason that she's still alive today. In September, Holly and Dania and Patrick meet for the first time in Chicago. But if you've been paying attention, you might still have some questions, and this is probably the type of audience where you are paying attention. Remember I said that Holly spit into a tube to take her DNA test, and I also said that the transplant had replaced all of her blood? So why would the DNA in her mouth match Patrick's? Right? Like what's going on there? So it turns out this actually depends on how you take a DNA sample from someone.

So option one, you can take a cotton swab and just swab the inside of your mouth, and this gets the cells of your cheek lining. And if Holly had done this, she probably would have just gotten her own results and we would have never gone down this entire rabbit hole. But what she did was spit into a tube, and it turns out that human saliva actually has a lot of white blood cells in it. And this makes sense if you think about it, because there are a lot of bacteria in your mouth. I'm sorry, but that's true. And white blood cells are immune cells, and they're there to deal with the bacteria in your mouth. And so studies have shown that actually something like an average of 74% of the human cells in saliva are white blood cells. So when

Holly spit into a tube, it was a mix of cheek cells that belonged to her and white blood cells whose DNA matched Patrick's. Holly is actually a chimera, which means that she's a mix of two different types of cells. And actually everyone who's ever had a bone marrow transplant or a cord blood transplant, which are tens of thousands people, they're also chimeras. And if you read the really, really fine print on a DNA test, they actually tell you not to take one if you had one of these transplants for this very reason. But of course, people don't read the fine print. So other people, like Holly, have found their donors this way. And sometimes it's been, you know, their brother or their sister, who they knew was a bone marrow donor, and sometimes it's been a complete stranger who

they had never met, who was a baby when it happened. And this has been one of the unexpected consequences of widespread and cheap DNA testing. No one ever thought that donors could be found. No one ever thought that patients would go find their donors this way. I just want to leave you was a thought about the world we live in today, which is that we have figured out how to take cells from the umbilical cord of a baby and put them inside another person and have that replace all of their blood cells, which means that if you donated your child's cord blood, or if your parents did that and forgot to ever tell you, it's possible that there's a stranger out there walking around with your DNA inside them, and you don't even know about it.

Thank you. Sarah Zang from theAtlantic.com. You can find more of her science stories online there. Last up, but certainly not the least. We have a story about one of the most remote places in the world, and what happens to all that stuff that we bring there. I've been there myself many years ago. we're talking about Antarctica.

Please welcome to the stage Science Friday's own education director, Ariel Zitch. Ariel. Thank you, Ira. Thank you all. I'm your last story in service of making your evening worthwhile. I'll end on a highly personal note that feels intimate and a little awkward. It starts about seven days into my trip in Antarctica. It was near the middle of the night.

You wouldn't know it because it was the astral summer, so it was absolutely high noon, essentially by daylight. hours. There was sun beaming into my tent, and I was weeping as quietly as I could. Ice-cold tears onto my sleeping bag. I had to do it quietly. I was in the dry valleys, and it was uncharacteristically windless night, so there was no sound of sand rushing against the tent, no flapping, you know, flaps or strings or anything like that. It was, it was a little intimate, and it was made more so by the fact that accommodations in Antarctica are essentially tent hotels. So all of the people I had been traveling with, the people I've been working with and reporting on for months up until this point,

were all about 20 feet away, also intense, on a quiet night. So I had to be quiet because I wanted to be cool. The people around me were people who I really respected. They were giants in Antarctica research. Many of these people had been going to Antarctica for 15, 20, 35 years. They had spent every Christmas away from their families to be there. They were in the dry valleys to study things that happened slowly and happened permanently, and that were barely traceable.

They were people who had docented me through one of the most protected, pristine climate regions on the planet. They had showed me how to pee in a water bottle. Awkward. Why? You asked because we couldn't risk adding nitrogen to the soil ecology because there aren't vertebrates that live there. There are no plants.

They taught me when we walked how to recognize in loose, silty sands in the dry valleys, the places where the people from the people from the last field season had walked so that I wouldn't crush permafrost with additional steps. Or to put my tripod so that I wouldn't leave too deep in Mark.

How to recognize rocks that were essential to noticing and measuring erosion patterns over the course of millennia, essentially. So I really respected them. And the reason I was quietly crying was because I had lost a lab mic clip. These things are little junky pieces of plastic. They're garbage, right?

there are a thing that you used to clip a tiny little mic on to your outer wear right and now and that's it that was my lab mic clip uh when you're field reporting especially when you're in a situation like in arctica where the cost of going is high you literally don't know if you'll ever be back for the rest of your life you don't want to miss anything and so every single thing i did i would take droves of photographs i would take loads of notes and i was recording all those conversations with fully with the consent of colleagues in this space but like yeah everything was being recorded so I could you know could figure out what photos I had taken which glacier is that all of that we were visiting some field sites that day in this area that we're special even to

the people who spend their lives there there were places that are that are so rare to visit and so gifted to these individuals through helicopter transit that that only hundreds of people had stepped there before and I was almost a hundred percent sure that I was that ass that had left a piece of plastic there. Okay, that was really upsetting. And after a long day, you know, yeah, it cut a little deeper. I'm tired. I would say it's like hard to sleep when it's bright out. But that hurt. That sucked. And, you know, it was actually that permanence that brought me there. You've heard a lot of stories about change. And that's because that's what science reporters talk about. We talk about changes in our technology, changes in our humanity. We talk about changes in things that shouldn't change.

like climate and ocean sea level and like all this stuff like the number of birds in the sky those things shouldn't change but we report on them because they are changing and you know when you're going after stories and particularly if you're going after it with a lens for education which is how I work right I want stories to tell young people I want to tell stories that are a little happier than that sorry so like a story about a place that's radically beautiful and pristine as heck is a really attractive thing that's that's a really attractive thing that's That's why I was there. And that evidence of that permanence was all over the place. It was really cool. Like they show you as you're flying in, they can point to buggy tracks that look like they were laid yesterday. Clear as day four wheelers with grooves that were 40 years old because that's how long soil sits.

They could point me to birds that they had met when they were in their late teens as graduate students who must be at least 68, who coasted in from the coast, checked to look for corpses, and then head back. And they're like, oh, that's Bob. He always looks at you like he hopes you're going to die. And it is cool. It is really cool. It's one of the only places where they've found that if you meet a glacier, it's probably an equilibrium.

So anywhere in the world now when you meet a glacier, it's leaving. And in the dry valleys of Antarctica, they can show that the deposition at the top of the mountain of new snow is keeping up with the melting at the bottom. And that's pretty wild. The thing that made it change for me was that even as we were walking around and looking at this evidence of permanence, seals, mummies, seals that, again, crawl in and die, and that's why the scoower, they're looking for their corpses,

they've been smiling at people with the same dry, gumless grin for 30 years. Even as I'm like, hey, cool, I saw you on a map that I harvested from the USGS from 1990. Anyone who wants to see the dead seal map, email me later. It's real, federally issued map of seal corpses. Even as those things were around, those evidences of permanence, I could see Mike, my host scientist, looking and pointing out permafrost degradation. He was like, check out that slump right there.

Do you see this wash of green algae? Do you see how this looks fresh? I'm like, yeah, it looks kind of like a stream guy. But he was like, yeah, but that's happening. You know, and on a helicopter ride back to base at McMurdo, the people on the plane were talking about this flood year and what it meant. And I said, what flood year? This place is called the dry valleys because there are lakes that are fed by glacial melt for two weeks of the year. It gets sunny enough to melt the glaciers to fall into these little streams to really, like, feed these lakes.

And those streamlets course the same courses every single year. But in the flood year, there were bogs. Those rivers overflowed their banks. Whole hillsides collapsed, revealing millennium's old cuts of ice in permafrost. It was the kind of thing where they talk about it as like, well, it was a lark. Oh, it was a lark. But see that? That's happening again right over there.

And you could hear the worry. These are people who had literally established this as a site for long-term ecological research. And so they want to see this happening. That's why they're there. and as the year worn on after the flight, years and years were on, and they were trying to figure out what's going on, okay? Recently, somebody modeled the ozone hole in a way that hadn't been done before. And the whole corona of climate, these high-speed winds that had been protecting this pristine place,

that had been keeping those glaciers locked, that thing had been bolstered by an anthropogenic factor, the ozone hole. It had actually been forcing this thing to stay open. But as we repaired, one dreaded human action, as we started cutting out CFCs and this thing started repairing itself, it actually collapsed in a way that allowed this global phenomenon to reach this place. And so it's there. It's happening.

This thing that's permanent isn't. And so this really, like, happy story is like, okay, well, that's really sad. And the people are feeling that sadness. But the most important thing is that when I was checking my cold weather year back to the federal government at the end, I found that stupid mic clip. Don't litter. That's it. Thank you, Ariel. Ariel Zitch, who is our education director, and you could read her story about climate change and long-term studies by visiting ScienceFriety.com slash methods.

Those stories were recorded in December 2019 at Caviott in New York's. City. Thanks to all the staff there, all the storytellers, and to the audience for making that event so much fun. And thank you for listening. See you on Friday. I'm Ira Plato in New York.