Science Friday - Social Media’s ‘Chaos Machine,’ Whale Vocal Fry, Distant Galaxies. March 3, 2023, Part 2

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

Inside The ‘Chaos Machine’ Of Social Media Despite social media’s early promises to build a more just and democratic society, over the past several years, we’ve seen its propensity to easily spread hate speech, misinformation and disinformation. Online platforms have even played a role in organizing violent acts in the real world, like genocide against the Rohinga people in Myanmar, and the violent attempt to overturn the election at the United States capitol. But how did we get here? Has social media fundamentally changed how we interact with the world? And how did big tech companies accumulate so much unchecked power along the way? Read an excerpt of The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World here.   Taking On Renewables’ AC/DC Disconnect In the push to transition society to more renewable energy sources, there are several logistical challenges. One central question involves the best way to connect solar panels and battery storage—which both produce direct current, into an energy grid that primarily provides alternating current at the local level. Dr. Suman Debnath leads a project called the Multiport Autonomous Reconfigurable Solar power plant (MARS) at Oak Ridge National Lab. He and his colleagues have designed a system of advanced power electronics that allow large, utility-scale solar facilities and battery storage projects to feed either AC or DC power, as needed. The approach, Debnath says, will both allow for better integration of those electric resources into the grid, and make it more possible to transport power long distances using more efficient DC transmission lines. Debnath talks with Ira about the MARS project, and ways to modernize the country’s power distribution system for greater reliability and efficiency.   Are These Ancient Galaxies Too Big For Their Age? We’ve all been wowed by the amazing images from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST. But sometimes, the important data isn’t in those amazing galactic swirls or wispy nebula images, but in the images of tiny smudges from far, far away. Astronomers recently described some of those smudges, tiny red dots thought possibly to be ancient, distant galaxies, in the journal Nature. However, if the red dots do in fact represent galaxies, they appear to be too large to fit predictions for how fast galaxies form. The possible galaxies may be about 13 billion years old, forming just 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, but appear to contain as many stars as much more mature galaxies. Dr Erica Nelson, an assistant professor of Astrophysics at the University of Colorado, Boulder and one of the authors of that paper, joins Ira to talk about the observation and what could explain the confusing finding.   How These Russian Wasps Could Help Save Ash Trees How do you find an insect the size of your fingertip in a densely packed forest? For Jian Duan, the answer is simple: Follow the dead ash trees. On a rainy day in eastern Connecticut, Duan, a federal research entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, walked to a dying ash covered with holes. Peeling back the bark with a drawknife, he revealed a mess of serpentine tunnels. Curled up inside was one of his targets: a larva of emerald ash borer. “Let’s collect it,” Duan said, gesturing as his assistant handed him a pair of tweezers tied to a brightly-colored ribbon. (In case you’re wondering, the ribbon makes the tweezers easy to spot when they’re dropped on the leaf-covered ground.) But today Duan isn’t just collecting emerald ash borers. He’s also looking for their predator, one released here on purpose in 2019 and 2020: a wasp known as Spathius galinae (pronounced spay-see-us glee-nuh). “It’s from the Russian Far East,” Duan said, smiling. “Unfortunately, there are no common names for these parasitic wasps.” To read the rest, visit sciencefriday.com.     Vocal Fry Serves Up Treats For Toothed Whales Toothed whales—species like orcas, bottlenose whales, and dolphins—use echolocation to zero in on prey about a mile deep into the ocean. Until now, scientists couldn’t quite figure out how the whales were making these clicking sounds in the deep ocean, where there’s little oxygen. A new study published in the journal Science, finds the key to underwater echolocation is vocal fry. Although in whales it might not sound like the creaky voice that some people love to hate, the two sounds are generated in a similar way in the vocal folds. Ira talks with the study’s co-author, Dr. Coen Elemans, professor of bioacoustics and animal behavior at the University of Southern Denmark based in Odense, Denmark.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Later in the hour, looking back in time with the web telescope to some ancient galaxies that have astronomers puzzled. Plus, scientists have finally figured out how tooth whales and dolphins make echolocation sounds. They use vocal fry. We'll tell you all about it. But first, it's become pretty normal to be glued to our smartphones, constantly checking social media, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok. You know what I'm talking about. And beyond just feeling stuck in an endless loop of distraction, we've seen the propensity for social media to easily spread hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation, and even play a role in organizing violent acts in the real world, like genocide against the Rohingya people in Myanmar, and closer to home, the January 6th violent attempt to overturn the election at the Capitol. But how did we get here?

Has social media fundamentally changed how we interact with? with the world? And how did big tech companies accumulate so much unchecked power along the way? Those questions are all addressed in a new book authored by Max Fisher. It's called The Chaos Machine, the inside story of how social media rewired our minds in our world. He's also an international reporter and columnist for the New York Times based in Los Angeles. Max, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks, Sarah. Very happy to be here. I want to start with what I think is the central argument in your book. It's not just that bad actors use social media to their advantage. These outcomes are actually baked into how these platforms are designed. Why is this such an important distinction to make?

For so long, we thought, and I include myself on this when I started on this project a few years ago, that the big harms in social media came from, you know, Russian hackers, extremists. But the more that I looked at it, really significant effects at this platform, or of these platforms, I should say, And the way that it subtly changes how we think, how we consume information, even form our own identities and our own sense of right and wrong. And it's easy to miss that because for any individual, the effect is subtle. But when you multiply that out by billions of users, and we have lots of empirical research that definitively shows this now, the effect is to change overall how society works. So there's a study that I like to cite a few years ago, these researchers took a bunch of people

in this experiment. And they said, okay, log on to this social media platform that we have mocked up to look like Twitter and send a post that expresses some level of outrage, whether you want to or not. And then they showed those users as if they had received lots of likes and shares and engagement and comments. And what they quickly found was that those users, regardless of how prone to outrage they had been beforehand, suddenly had this desire to send more and more posts with outrage in it. But what really blew my mind about this was that those research subjects became, even when they were away from the experiment, became more prone to feeling outrage into expressing outrage as people.

What I understand you're saying is that the social media designers know about this foible that we have and they purposely design it to amplify divisiveness between groups. It's not as if there's like a big dial in Silicon Valley and Mark Zuckerberg is like turning it up to say more outrage in society. The way that this kind of happened is that the engineers who design these systems and these very powerful artificial intelligence systems, they want you to spend more time in the platforms and they want you to act in certain ways, whatever ways the system determines will get you to spend more time online and get you to encourage other uses to. spend more time online. But we now know that the effect of that from lots of research, including researchers and alarm raises within the companies themselves, that the result of that is several things, but above all else, moral outrage, us versus them, tribalism, and a sense of heightened identity conflict. And they've known this for years and they haven't changed anything.

How did the founders of social media companies come to shape the type of tools they want to develop? So it's two forces that came together. The big one that I think a lot of us are familiar with are ideology, that technology can and should change the world. It should displace and tear down the old outdated institutions, the old norms, the old ways of doing things, and replace them with this new populist, decentralized, purely democratic way of running the world. But then the other element that you have that comes into this are the economics.

When you started a company in Silicon Valley, the way that these companies got funded was through something called venture capital. You would have an investor who would come in. They would want to give a company a bunch of money, not necessarily so that the company would slowly accrue a profit over time and over many years they would make their money back, but rather so that the company would sell quickly. And the way that you do that really quickly and for a really high return is by building the largest user base you possibly can. And in fact, what happened within a few years of this was that the companies realized that they had, and there's some internal memos that are absolutely fascinating where they talk about this openly, that they had basically maxed out the pool of human attention in the world. There are only so many people, and we each have only so many minutes in the day. And so if your business model is you have to get 10 times as many eyeballs on your site and each person has to be spending 10 times as much time on there, you run out of good ways to do it. And you end up in this arms race where you have to get bigger and better technology, more and more sophisticated systems to manipulate people.

And they used to be quite open about this, to manipulate people and to addict people to your platform so they will spend more time on. And in fact, you have a story in your book about Myanmar as a social laboratory for all of this and how effective it can be. Tell us about that. Yeah, Myanmar is a fascinating and cautionary take. So I was in Myanmar first in 2014, and the two big groups to arrive in the country were the U.S. government, which was helping to orchestrate the opening up to the West. It had been this closed off military dictatorship for a long time in the Silicon Valley tech companies, which at that point were seen as these kind of harbingers of democratic revolution. And the reason that these social media companies did this was because they needed to keep growing their user base. They had basically run out of users and develop. Western countries. And they saw the global South as this opportunity. They thought we can go in and we can train an entire society to use our platforms as the primary vehicle for accessing the internet. And that will create a user base that will one day be so valuable that we can bring that to

our shareholders now, bring that to investors now. And the way that they did this was very canning. They went into these countries where it's very expensive to access the internet. You don't do it through a computer. You do it through a smartphone. And you have to pay for every little bit of data use, which is prohibitively costly. And they said, okay, we're going to make a deal with cell carriers. You buy a cell phone or me and heart, which most people were doing for the first time. And it is going to come preloaded with this Facebook app. If you use the internet through the Facebook app, it's free. Anything you do on it is free. And what that means is that, and I saw this firsthand when I was there, an entire society thinks that Facebook is the internet.

But what makes that so consequential is that everything that they do is filter. through these same artificial intelligence algorithms that are designed to serve them the specific kinds of content and the specific ways that will be maximally engaging to them. And what we very quickly learned in Myanmar is that that was racism, hate speech, excitement. And you could watch it spin up where these rumors and these hate speech groups that previously had been pretty obscure or had not had that much of reach, all of a sudden exploded on social media because the platforms is boosting them. And you would start to see riots. You would start to see mobs that were overrunning members of the country's Muslim minority. And Facebook and the other platforms got warning after warning.

Something really bad is going. And we know where this is going. And then in 2017, a few years into this, it helped contribute to, of course, was not the only cause, but help contribute to Myanmar slide into one of the worst genocides of the 21st century. Awful. Awful. I can recall a panic in the 90s and the early aught about how TV was rotting our brains. I mean, mean violent video games making teens more violent. You argue that social media is fundamentally different from other types of mass media. And interestingly, you compare it to smoking. Tell us about that. The big difference is that what we have now with social media is mountains and mountains of empirical hard research into what being on social media does that has

repeatedly affirmed that it changes your behavior, changes your cognition in ways that were never true of video games or listening to, you know, M&M cassette tapes. Similarly, with cigarettes, for many decades, we had hard research that over and over said that not only are cigarettes addictive, not only did they give you cancer, but in fact, just as these social media platforms are deliberately designed in a way that produces these foreseeable harms, cigarettes were deliberately instilled with specific chemicals that were meant to addict consumers, and that were knowingly harmful to them. And another parallel with Big Tobacco is that something that we learned in, I think, the 90s,

was that Big Tobacco had been doing their own research, that had repeatedly been finding our products are addictive, our products cause cancer. And the same is true as social media. Francis Hogan, remember the Facebook researcher who leaked a bunch of internal Facebook documents, had all of these reports finding that Facebook's own researchers were looking into, what does our platform do to users, what are the effects? and they were finding the exact same thing that these independent researchers were finding just as their executives, again, like big tobacco executives, were coming out and saying,

no, no, no, there's nothing to this. Our product is fine. You know, it's a neutral amplifier of things that are already in the culture. It couldn't possibly be causing all of these things. So I think that there's been a kind of broader cultural ship and understanding that, okay, maybe this is a little bit different. But what happened with cigarettes back in the day was that they were regulated. The Surgeon General put warnings on boxes.

Advertising was regulated. Do you see regulation as an answer to this in social media? This is the big debate right now. And it's a really hard question because people do need social media. I mean, it is so essential and has made itself so essential to our lives at this point that it's hard to just say, you know, oh, we'll just turn it off or we'll just shut down the companies. the kind of two schools of thought on regulation are, one is to say that these are akin to the cigarette companies, and we should just say, look, these products are innately harmful. So the only appropriate response is, as we did with cigarettes, to try to regulate out the harms,

but of course the big effort with cigarettes wasn't to change the underlying product. So the only effective thing we can do is make them harder to access. But there is, I should say, another school of thought. And honestly, I think it's too early to say which of these is right that says that actually maybe we can with more kind of surgically precise regulation, shift the incentives of the companies to create a version of social media that is not so harmful and not so destructive. Well, if it makes any less money for the companies, I don't hold that much hope for that happening, Max. Yeah, I think I share your view, unfortunately. Max Fisher, author of The Chaos Machine, The Insight Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World,

thank you for spending some time with us. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. And you can also read an excerpt of the book on our website, ScienceFriiday.com slash chaos. Coming up after the break, the challenges of bringing more solar and battery storage to the electric grid. How do you tie it all together? This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.

As the drive to bring solar energy and batteries into our electric grid expands, there are sometimes logistical challenges, nuts and bolt stuff, like how do you tie all the solar panels into the grid, along with the battery storage needed to provide for times when the sun isn't shining? And how do you feed power east and west across the U.S. during peak times when needed? Well, part of the solution lies in redesigning our grid to carry high-voltage direct current instead of AC alternating current that dates back to the time of Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla. Someone who is working on the problem and has a solution is my next guest. Dr. Sunam Dave Knath leads a project called the multiport autonomous reconfigurable solar power plant,

or Mars, easier way to say it, at the Oak Ridge National Lab in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Ira, for that introduction. Appreciate having me on this show. Did I describe the challenge accurately? What is the problem that you're trying to solve? I think he was spot on. One of the things that we are looking at is we are trying to identify mechanisms by which we can integrate solar and energy storage to DC and AC transmission. That's the specific challenge that we were trying to target here. Additionally, we are trying to utilize also DC transmission to tide over some of this variability because the DC transmission provides the capability to connect over different time zones, which means that when you're seeing

solar generation in one time zone, you may not see solar generation in the other time zone. One example that comes to my mind is the capability to connect East Coast to West Coast, for example. What does DC get to, that alternating current does not? When we are sending power over long distances, DC transmission is less lossy and is much more cost effective in compared to AC transmission. At the same time, DC is also able to provide controllability in the flow of power. So just like one of the examples that I had mentioned earlier, that you're trying to connect different time zones and different regions in United States. So which means that you are able to send power with controllability capability that DC brings in. Thirdly, DC has the capability to be able to send emergency power from an unaffected region to an affected region during an extreme event.

So, for example, when hurricanes happen and it affects a specific region, using DC you can send controlled power flow from an unaffected region which is not affected by an hurricane. My solar panels, the solar panels at these large generating stations are producing direct current. and what comes into my house is alternating current. So you have to find a way of mixing them together. So how did you do that? I mean, what is actually inside your magical black box that allows it to run smoothly now? What did you do?

So we looked at a unique electronic architecture, which is cost-effective and reliable, the black box that we see today, in terms of being able to connect solar and energy storage to the power grid. and also for that matter at our homes, which are much smaller solar and energy storage, the black box that is present between them is also for electronics. Now, the difference that we were looking at is the uniqueness in the architecture that we were

trying to evaluate because we were trying to go from much lower voltages, like thousands of volts I had briefly mentioned, to hundreds of thousands of volts in both DC and AC. So that's where the uniqueness in the architecture came into picture. Do you have any test systems? Do you have anything up and running? We have at this point laboratory tests. So this is still in research phase. We are not yet full-fledged in terms of development, which is our next few steps that we have in our pipeline. And what will you need to get this to work? Are we going to need new transmission lines, new ways to interconnect regions and all that? So today, it is predominantly an AC transmission power grid that we have. At the same time, there is increased interest in DC in the past decade through the more DC lines you're seeing in the regions, some of the regions,

and we're going to see much more in the next few decades as well. So it is possible to integrate this technology in the location where there are existing DC lines today. And that was one of our case studies that we were looking at. At the same time, we were also looking at case studies where we were trying to connect to the DC lines that are coming up in the near future as well as in the next couple of decades. How were you able to get past the problem that Thomas Edison faced in his DC transmissions when he couldn't get them to go more than a block, right? I always thought that long-range DC would lose current in the lines. Why does that not happen? A very interesting question. I was expecting this at some point that the war of currents will come up that happened

in the late 19th century. The reason that AC transmission won over DC is the fact that they were transformers, which means that you could change from a low voltage to a high voltage and high voltage back to a low voltage with ease. Just like you mentioned, it makes it much lesser lossy to be able to transmit over long distances using AC transmission because you have those transformers which could change from low voltage to high voltage. Whereas for DC back then, they didn't have easy mechanism by which you could convert a low voltage. And so you're transmitting at low voltage, which was more lossy. Now, with significant enhancements that have happened in power. electronics, which is the technology that will help with converting DC and AC, you are able to

now convert between a low voltage DC to a high voltage DC, and you're able to actually convert between AC and DC. So there have been significant advances that are happening and have happened in Polychronics that are assisting us now. Are you saying then that we will be transforming our system mostly into a direct current into a DC system for everything? I believe it's going to be a combination. So today's existing system will still be prevalent in terms of it is an AC transmission.

At the same time, DC transmission will also be increasingly being introduced. So it will be a hybrid solution that you would have, where you would have both AC and DC, leveraging the benefits of DC where it becomes important to use DC while continuing to use AC where we can continue to use AC. So when we are looking at transmission also, there are shorter distance transmission and longer distance transmission. The shorter distance transmission will still be alternating current. The longer distance would be a combination of alternating current and direct current, because alternating current is already existing. The newer ones you're going to see is going to be a lot of DC that is going to come in as we move forward.

So I'm going to still be getting that AC power into that transformer on the telephone pole outside. You are. You are going to see that still. You're going to see that at least for some time in the future. Are there still problems to be worked out here? And what's it going to take? I'm talking about a timeline here for these to be on the grid. The work that we were looking at, the multiport autonomous reconfigurable solar power plant or the acronym Mars that you mentioned, we have a commercialization timeline that we have,

and we are looking at moving from laboratory-scale prototypes and laboratory-scale research that we are doing to more of controlled field environment testing in the next five to 10 years for medium voltage. So when I say medium voltage, it is going to be in the tens of thousands of volts that you mentioned, Ira, sometime back. And at the same time, you would also be trying to look at the next step after that, which is going to be in hundreds of thousands of volts, which is the transmission grid scale that I mentioned. That will be in the next 10 to 20 years. You know, there are people who say that big central power is the thing of the past. We should be doing neighborhood generation, microgrids. How do you answer that?

Very interesting question, Ira. So it is still cost effective to have large centralized generation. At the same time, when you have microgrids, it does provide reliability benefits. But I would envisage at the end of the day would be a combination of the two where you have these large central generation, which is still cost effective and having decentralized power where it is necessary and important to have much more reliability as well as have the capability to have the capability to have the capability to have. emergency source of power. So it's going to be a combination of the two as we move forward. Dr. Sumen, Dave Knaff, leads a project called Mars at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Thanks again for being with us today. Thank you, Ira, for hosting me. It's been a pleasure. Who hasn't been wowed by the images coming out of the James Webb Space Telescope? But sometimes the important data is not in those amazing galactic swirls or those wispy nebula images. Now, sometimes the important stuff is in the tiny smudges far, far away. Astronomers describe their studies of some of these smudges as galaxies from the early, early universe,

and they were surprised those galaxies should not be there, at least not at that size. Joining me to discuss those mysterious masses is Dr. Erica Nelson, assistant professor of astrophysics University of Colorado in Boulder, and one of the researchers. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me. So how surprising was this? It was very surprising.

This was definitely the most exciting discovery of my scientific career thus far. It was really amazing to see these things. We just did not expect them. Well, what did you expect to see? We expect to see really little tiny galaxies when we look back to the very early universe. We don't expect to see big behemoths like the Milky Way existing so close to the earliest cosmic times. There needs to be more time for those objects to form.

Did you discover this by accident? Were you looking for something and found these? You know, I think the most exciting discoveries are definitely the ones you don't expect. I was looking at these spectacular images when they were first released to us by NASA. and I noticed these bright red dots that were in the James Webb images that we didn't see in the Hubble images. I was really struck by them. And so my team and I started to try to figure out what these were, right? Because as astronomers, the only thing we get is light.

And from that, we have to infer everything we would like to know about the objects we're looking at. And it turns out these things were really massive galaxies that should not exist. Let's talk about the science of how you knew all of this. How do you know how old they might be? The way we know their distance is by their redshift. So what that means is that as the light from an object is traveling through an expanding universe, its wavelength is stretched out by this expanding space that it's traveling through. And when that light arrives at us, it's gone from being light that we could have seen into the infrared. And so that's how, we know that these objects are really, really distant. And the surprising thing is that they're too big for their age?

Yes, that is exactly the surprising thing. You know, the universe started, we think, in the Big Bang 14 billion years ago. And at that point, all of space and time and matter and energy was created. And then it had to assemble itself into the structures that we see. And that started with the littlest things like atoms and then stars and then eventually galaxies. But we think because of that, that galaxies, especially big galaxies, took a long time to build up billions of years. And we see these galaxies.

They're really massive. They have the number of stars that the Milky Way has now at close to the beginning of cosmic time. And that just should not be possible. When you say close to the beginning, how close is that? 500 million years, which does. does not sound like a lot, but a lot had to happen before galaxies that big could form. So how fast are the galaxy supposed to form? We would expect objects like this not to be able to form for a couple billion years.

And here they are, you know, at a couple hundred million. Wow. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This brings up that age-old question. Do we have to rewrite the textbooks about how the universe form? I mean, hopefully. But first, you know, we are scientists, so we have to confirm

that these galaxies are as big as we think they are. And then, you know, there's a lot of other steps we need to go through before we say we have to scrap everything we think we know. You know, the universe as a whole dictates how

the contents in it form. But there's a lot of steps going from, the big scale of the universe to the galaxies that we see. You know, the dark matter forms, the scaffolding for all these galaxies, and then it attracts gas, and that gas has to form into stars, and those stars have to create galaxies. And so there's a lot of different steps in that process that could be wrong before we say our whole model of the universe is wrong.

How can you tell how big it is? I mean, if it looks just like a little red smudge, a dot, how do you know how many stars there are in it? That is a great question. And that is definitely the most challenging aspect of this work. Because you have to take light and turn it into a measurement of mass, which is a hard thing to do. And so we have these fairly sophisticated models for how you sum up. the light from stars of different ages over the history of the object. And then from that, you can add up the total amount of mass that's in those stars. And that's how we infer the mass.

So where do you go from here? I mean, you've discovered something unexpected. What's the next step in trying to prove that this is really real? We definitely need more detailed information. We need spectroscopy. So we really need additional data from James Webb in order to confirm that these things are what we think they are. Yeah. So there are other possibilities here. Maybe they're not actually galaxies, but some other kind of object? Yeah. You know, the signatures that we see in their light are not like anything that we've ever seen before. So we think they're massive galaxies, but it turns out one of them is already a supermassive black hole instead of a galaxy. Yeah, I know. Funsies. And we think of black holes as being dark, but if they're eating,

then they're actually some of the most luminous objects in the universe. So, you know, one of these, we think is a supermass of black hole. And others of them could be something even weirder. So this could actually open up a whole different kind of astronomy. I mean, that would be awesome. I mean, yeah, if it's weirder than you really even really think about the formation. That's kind of cool, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, that's why we launched this telescope, right? Is to explore the wild, weird universe that we have out there and to discover completely new kinds of objects and things that we didn't expect.

You know, if we launched this telescope and then it just confirmed everything that we thought we knew, that would be so boring. But this way, you know, the theorists will have work forever. Isn't it more fun to find something you don't know about than something you would expect? It's so much more fun. And that's why I just did this by looking at the images and seeing what was there that I didn't expect to see. You know, and it's cool because I, you know, I was just flipping back and forth between these images, which is, you know, something anyone can do. You know, I think one of the things that is a misunderstanding of astrophysics is that you have to be a

math genius to make discoveries. But that's not actually true. And I think it's really important that kids know that in order to make discoveries about our universe, you just have to be curious about the world around you. And that's a great way to end, Dr. Nelson, a great summary. And we'll keep looking up with you. Thanks. Dr. Eric Nelson, assistant professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. When we come back, how a tiny parasitic wasp could help save ash trees from the notorious emerald ash borer. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Arofletto. Now it's time to check in on the state of science.

This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local stories of national significance. About 20 years ago, scientists in the U.S. identified an invasive insect, the emerald ash borer, that would go on to wreak havoc in forests. It's a very small metallic green bug about the size of a grain of rice. It is tiny but lethal. These bugs have killed millions of ash trees. Their larvae bore into the tree. They feed on the part that moves water and sugar around and then slowly starve the tree to death. In a race to save the ash trees, researchers hatched a plan to use parasitic wasps to keep emerald ash borer populations under control. It's called biocontrol. So has the plan playing out here with the update is Patrick Scahill, reporter and editor at Connecticut Public Radio in Hartford, Connecticut. Welcome to Science Friday. Nice to have you back. Thanks. Glad to be here. This is really a deadly little bug, isn't it? This is a deadly bug, Ira, and you set it up perfectly in your intro. This is an insect that was first detected in Michigan in 2002, probably arrived in the U.S. a little bit

earlier than that. Since then, it's gone across to at least 30 states in the U.S., killed tens of millions of ash trees. I spoke with an entomologist here in Connecticut. Claire Rutledge is her name. She described Emerald Ashbor and its impact on trees this way. So one larva is not a big deal. 20 larvae are not a big deal. 2,000 larvae killed the tree. And so it's really a problem of scale. You know, in its native range where Emerald Ashbor exists in Asia, there have been predators that have kind of co-evolved with these pests to keep them in check. But when Emerald Ashpor came to the U.S., in many ways entomologists told me it was it was a novel threat it was kind of like COVID for trees it came in the trees didn't have a defense for it it hit them hard and it killed them off and when these insects

would swarm these trees in thousands and thousands of numbers the trees just didn't have the strength to fight that off it's cost according to federal officials at the USDA municipalities nursery operators the forest product industry tens of millions of dollars and it's affected industry too things you might not think of like basket weaving that can rely on using ash trees. Baseball bats is another big one. Ash baseball bats are quickly going away because the ash trees just aren't there anymore. Yeah, so experts brought in some parasitic wasps to help. Tell us about that. What did they do to the Emerald Ashpore? Yeah, so this is something called biocontrol, and it's not a new idea. The basic idea here is when a pest comes in, you find a

predator that can handle it. Gian Duan is a federal research entomologist with the U.S. Department of agriculture, who described it this way. So basically the idea is to reestablish connection with the exotic or invasive pest because in the native range, you know, these natural enemies co-evolved with the pest. When Emerald Ashboro was first detected here in the U.S., that's what scientists did.

They went over to Asia. They searched literature. They talked to people and found wasps that prey on Emerald Ashbor. Right now, the USDA says there are four known stingless wasps. and these are wasps that don't stink people, that will either attack EAB larva or its eggs, and the service is currently evaluated in the fifth wasp. Why is it that Russian wasps do the job are none here in the U.S.? Yeah, so one of the things that scientists here in Connecticut are actually looking at

is a wasp that's adapted to the cold of the Russian Far East, which is good for New England because, you know, it gets cold here. So they brought that wasp over here and have used it in New England for us, because they think it might be a little bit more hardy and a little bit more able to withstand the cold temperatures that happen here in the winter. You know, when people hear about wasps being released, they're kind of scary because they're wondering whether they're going to come after us and sting us. Yeah. And so these are, again, these are stingless swaps. And the research process for bringing these over here and ensuring that they will only attack target species, in this case, Emerald Ashpore, is an extensive one. The USDA, according to Duan, spent years evaluating these wasps in isolation in labs where there was, you know, key access to get in to interact with these specimens that they had. And they just threw a lot of potential host species at it and found no.

In fact, these wasps really only do target emerald ash borer once the science on that played out, again, over the course of years, scientists from multiple countries had to sign off on this, and then these releases did happen. I know that you went out with these researchers to look for the wasps. Tell us what that was like. Yeah, it's a very interesting process that takes a lot of time. So these are researchers who are literally walking through a forest, looking for ash trees that are either dead or very close to being dead. They have a draw knife, which is something that you can use to peel back the bark on the tree. And when they do that, they're looking for trees. When they peel back the bark, they see these sort of serpentine tunnels that are in there that are really indicative of air. emerald ash borer larva, which get into the tree again and bore their way through. When they find those, they'll look for evidence of the wasp. And it's really a matter of just going tree to tree, collecting data, and then collecting enough data that they can kind of create bigger models that

show, you know, how these wasps are controlling emerald ash borer and whether or not they're staying in the area where they were introduced, or are they going on and following kind of the leading edge of these outbreaks as they spread across the country. Well, tell us about that because it's been 10 years since the wasps were introduced in Connecticut, and how well is this plan shaping up? Yeah, so Connecticut and Massachusetts here in New England began using biocontrol agents in 2013. Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont. They're all doing similar experiments. Again, let's hear from Claire Rutledge to get her take on how this is going so far. You know, so I'm really, you know, cautiously optimistic. The problem with biocontrol is it's going to be 10 or 15 years later when we

see how much of a resurgence the ash manages. And so here in Connecticut, again, these wasp were released in 2013. It's been 10 years. I think one of the initial concerns was that the wasp wasn't going to stay put. They were going to, you know, kind of pig out when there was a major outbreak of Emerald Ashboro and then they were going to kind of follow that outbreak as it moved out. But they're not finding that. They're actually finding. reproducing populations are still in the areas where they were introduced 10 years ago, and they're staying here in Connecticut. So Rutlitz says she's optimistic about that because while the ashtrees that are here are gone

and are not going to come back, the young seedlings that are growing up might be able to combat Emerald Ashpore a little bit better in the future because this ambient population of the wasps will be existing later on. It's just that the wasps like a lot of things about Connecticut as we do, right, Patrick? You know, who could blame them for leaving, right? What a wonderful place to be. Patrick Skaill, reporter and editor at Connecticut Public Radio based in Hartford, thank you for joining us.

Of course. I want to end this hour with a story that's, well, how should I say, a whale of a tail. Toothed whales think orca, bottle nose whales and dolphins. Toothed whales use echolocation to zero in on prey deep underwater. And we're talking about a mile deep or more. Until now, scientists couldn't quite figure out. how the whales were making those clicking sounds in the deep ocean where there's little air. Turns out the key to underwater echolocation is vocal fry. Yeah, that creaky voice that some

people love to hate, only this time in a whale. Here's what it sounds like. Here to tell us more about this discovery published this week in the journal Science is my guest. Dr. Cohen-Elemon's professor of bioacoustics and animal behavior at the University of Southern Denmark, Bayes. in Odinson, Denmark. He's joining us today from Washington. Dr. Ellamunds, welcome back to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having me again. It's great. Can you begin by telling us exactly what vocal fry is for people who don't know? Yes, a vocal fry is one of the few human registers. We have at least three, maybe four, where the vocal folds move qualitatively different in each register. And with Vocal Fry, the movements are such that the vocal faults are basically close

for more than 60 to 80% of the time. So they're closed most of the time. And then they open very briefly and then they have a little snap. So a very little bit of air passes through. So why exactly does Vocal Fry help tooth whales with echolocation when they are so deep underwater? What we've been able to show now is that sound production in Tooth Whales, actually occurs in their nose. And by combining a bunch of different experiments, we've been able to show that two pairs of phonoclips basically make these echolocation clicks. So these echolocation clicks are made in the vocal fry register. And one of the cool things of this is that when whales dive, of course, their volume of air decreases very, very rapidly and below 100 meters, they only have

10% left. Below a kilometer, they only have 1% left. So they need to be very air efficient. And this vocal fry registers allows them to be very efficient with their air. What are they actually doing in their bodies, in their heads and the melon? When the whales dive, they basically shuttle all the air that's in their lungs into their nose. And there it goes into a cavity that's in the skull that cannot be compressed. So the air stays there safely. And then the larynx, which we use to produce sound, lost this function in tooth whales. And it's become a very efficient plug.

So it fits very nicely into this bony nose structure, basically. And that allows them to separate the two compartments, basically. So you have an air compartment in the nose and an air compartment that's very rapidly declining in the lungs. So when they dive, the lungs completely collapse and all the air moves in their nose. Now, this allows them to separate the control of these volumes. And that's been key, I think. So one of the main things they can do is they can now pressurize the air in their nose,

nose to extremely high pressures without damaging lung tissue. So when we play, for example, trumpet really loud and would try to do it a few times louder, we would actually damage our lungs. And these animals uncoupled, these driving pressures basically in their nose and in the lungs. And then the other cool thing they can do is then they can use this very high driving pressures to make the loudest sounds in the animal kingdom, basically. Now you categorize tooth whale vocalizations into three different registers similar to humans. Vocal fry, which we just talked about. Then you have the chest register, normal speaking tone, and the falsetto, even higher than the others. Why did you decide to categorize them in this way? It's actually the other way around. When we realized that this was

analog to normal vocal fault oscillation, we realized that this huge diversity of sounds that these animals make actually fit very nicely in these three categories that are the registrists. And then what we did is we tried to, through different lines of evidence, try to show that this is also the case. And one line is the sound. So you see indeed that these animals make distinct sounds that have different waveforms, but also different frequency ranges, just like registers. Then also the anatomy supports it. And lastly, we looked at the opening and closing of these vocal folds. First in vitro, but then later also using tags.

We try to reconstruct the vocal fold kinematics of animals. diving down to two kilometers deeps based on the sounds that we could record on these tags. Okay, let's listen to what these different registers sound like. Let me play first the orca, the killer whale. Dr. Alamans, tell us what we were hearing. So first you were hearing a few echolocation clicks. And after that, another sound these animals make, and this is definitely in a higher frequency range, right? And last was what's called a whistle. And these whistles go even up to 80 kilohertz in killer whales. It's really spectacular. They have an enormous frequency range they can produce.

I am absolutely sure there's going to be lots of different sounds that don't necessarily fit in these categories, but this provides us first physiological basis to start classifying these sounds. Okay, now let's listen to the bottle-nosed dolphin. It also starts with echolocation and then the other two registers. Wow. That really doesn't sound like the vocal fry I'm familiar with in people. Now, so during echolocation, the frequencies are very, very, load. Yeah, it's almost like a hearing test, you know, when they try to see how low you can hear.

I'm Irafledo, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This study, I understand, is the culmination of 10 years of research, and in that time you had to develop some new techniques to study echolocation. How did you study the tooth whales? Yeah, so I think what's really fun in this study is that we use a lot of different approaches. So first, we develop techniques to film trained animals, so inside in their nose, with very small endoscopes and fast cameras. That allowed us to show that the source was definitely in the nose, but it also posed a conundrum because we saw there was clear motion going on with each echolocation click, but it happened after the click.

So that was totally weird. And what we did then is that we developed a setup that we've also used for other species in the lab where we can blow air through an isolated head. it's very difficult to study these animals. It took several years to collect sufficiently fresh animals, basically, that died either in beechings or in fishermen's nets to be able to show really, von der Globes make the sound. We also tagged animals, where you put an acoustic tag on the animal, and we needed to be very precise to have the tag on the nose.

And there was also seething through many, many years of tagged animals. Now, what did we know and what didn't we know about how tooth whales make vocalizations before this study? So what we definitely knew is that the sounds was produced somewhere in the nose. There was a lot of different lines of evidence. It's very challenging to film them. And so people have tried to film them, but these were insufficiently high frame rates to actually demonstrate these were the sound sources. But now we've established that it's actually that sound source and also the theory we established for, human sound production is also applicable here in a completely new organ that's evolved only in

these animals. This study focused on tooth whales as we've been talking about. What about baleen whales who also make sounds but don't use echolocation? What do we know about their anatomy? In baleen whales, we have a similar problem that we know all the things we know about their sound production are acoustic recordings and they're very hard to interpret because if you put a hydrophone on the water, you can record animals within several kilometers. So it's very hard to pinpoint which animal makes what sound. And again, it's very hard to get fresh tissue there, but we know very little about the functional aspects of those baleen whales as well. Do they have the same origins, both kinds of whales?

Both groups of whales evolved from a common ancestor about 40, 45 million years ago. And that was an animal that much resembled a hippo. And then at some point, echolocation evolved in these animals and the tooth whales come out of that group. And the other group became the Berlin whales. Huh. So echolocation seems to be the reason why they branched out. Given just how critical vocal fry is to how tooth whales evolved and hunt for prey, do you think this might change some vocal fry haters to better appreciate its usefulness? I really hope so. I really hope so. It was very funny because been very much focused on this in the last weeks, of course, a month. If you listen or on airports

here or so, like, so many people use vocal fry at the start of sentences, at the end of sentences, and it's not just young women or old women or men or everybody does it. It's very common. Let's make it official. Let's call today Science Vocal Friday. Okay. Vocal Friday. I like that one. All right. Dr. Ellumann, thank you for taking to have to be with us today. Thanks so much. Take care. Alamans, Professor of Bioacoustics and Animal Behavior at the University of Southern Denmark, based in Odinza, Denmark. If you want to listen to those tooth whale vocal fry recordings again, or check out some graphics explaining whale vocal anatomy, sure, go to our website,

sciencefriety.com slash whale sounds. And that wraps up another show. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.