Science Friday - Soil Future, Plant Feelings, Science Fair. Sept 14, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: September 14, 2018

Climate change is increasing temperatures and causing heavier rainfalls across the country. Scientists are studying how these changes will affect different natural resources, including the soil ecosystem. For example, in Wisconsin, soil erosion is predicted to double by 2050 due to heavier rainfalls, according to a report by the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts. Agricultural scientist Andrea Basche talks about how soil formation and health is tied to climate. She joins microbiologist Kristen DeAngelis, who is conducting a long-term study to determine how increased temperatures affect soil microbiome, how to protect this resource, and what our soil reserves might look like in the next fifty years. Plants have a unique challenge in staying alive long enough to produce offspring. Unable to move and at the mercy of their surroundings, they present a tempting source of nutrition for bacteria and animals alike. But they’re not helpless. Botanists have long known plants are capable of sensing their environments and responding to them. They can grow differently in response to shade or drought, or release noxious chemicals to fend off predators, even as a caterpillar is mid-way through chewing on a leaf. But how does that information travel? New research published in the journal Science shows a first glimpse, in real time, of distress signals traveling from one leaf, snipped, crushed, or chewed, to other healthy leaves in the same plant. The signal, a wave of calcium ions, seems linked to the amino acid glutamate, which in animals acts as a neurotransmitter. University of Wisconsin-Madison botany professor Simon Gilroy, a co-author on the new research, explains this chemical signaling pathway and other advances in how we understand plant communication.  At some science fairs, baking soda volcanos can grab the blue ribbon prize. But at the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), a winning project is a design to kill cancer cells. ISEF is the grand championship of science fairs, where students from around the world submit their best research projects and compete in a high-stakes, hormone-filled challenge, which is showcased in full display in the new film, Science Fair. Like any high school experience, it can be a pressure cooker of anxiety, but also a time when many students find their calling—a crucible from which our future scientists are born. Ira talks with one of the film’s directors, Cristina Costantini, and catches up with a former ISEF participant Robbie Barrat, to discuss life after Science Fair. View a trailer of the film below and find screening times and locations here. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato, coming to you today from the studios of KUER, NPR, Utah in Salt Lake City. Later in the hour, inside the secret signals plants send from leaf to leaf when danger strikes. But first, while Hurricane Florence is washing away homes and highways in the south, all that flooding not only devastates property, takes lives, but it severely impacts agriculture, and I'm talking about the soil. A 2011 report put out by Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts, states if we don't take action, this rainfall pattern, quote, could cause soil erosion in Wisconsin to double by 2050 from 1990 rates. So what is the impact of changing climate on the soil? And what does this mean for the future of soil health?

My next guest calls soil the underdog of natural resources, and she's here to explain how we're we should be paying more attention to too much water. Well, Andrea Bache is an agricultural scientist at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. So why do you call a sorely underdog natural resource? That's a great question, Ira. You know, I feel we give a lot of attention to water, pollution, and air quality,

but infrequently do you hear about the imperative of. soil. So I appreciate you and your team taking a segment to give us the opportunity to promote that. But water and air seem to get a lot more attention than soil. Yeah. Well, we're going to talk about it now. You know what's really interesting because when people talk about soil in the Midwest, in the West, they look at the 1930s dust bowl drought as a major cause of soil erosion in the plains of the Midwest. But today, out of Nebraska, where you are, rain is too much rain is the problem. Well, too much rain is. isn't always the problem. It can be sometimes too much of the problem. So, you know, just to put

some of the soil numbers that we're seeing, soil erosion numbers into context, there have been several articles that summarize erosion rates and soil formation rates. David Montgomery is a great soils person, has written some really wonderful books about soils and society. And he estimates that's soil formation rate, so how quickly soil forms, to be happening at a rate of about less than half a ton of soil per acre per year. And let me just put that into context for you that research out of Iowa State University where I went to graduate school called the Daily Erosion Project, they produced daily estimates of erosion for parts of the upper Midwest, including parts of southeast Nebraska. And, you know, I was looking at some of the numbers

recently, and they estimate that parts of Southeast Nebraska in 2017 had overreesome. 30 tons of soil loss per acre per year. So again, if we're thinking about formation rates being less than half a ton per acre per year, we're losing soil in one year that's going to take decades to replace. And another example where I live in Lincoln, we've had a lot of rain this year. We've had about six inches of rain the beginning of this month. The Daily Erosion Project estimated some areas in the eastern part of the state of losing more than three tons per acre. That's just over a few days, right? So it's going to take. several years to replace what was lost in just a few days.

What does all this rain do to the structure of the soil? Right. So the force of rainfall hitting the soil can break up the good aggregation that you have. And those soil aggregates, if you think about soil, it's kind of a matrix of particles and those aggregates being really critical to having good space in the soil for roots to grow, for water to infiltrate. As you have that declining structure, you have less opportunity for good crop productivity. You're also losing, you know, the most nutrient-rich part of the soil when you have that erosion. So the rich topsoil is going away with that, and that's leading to other problems like water pollution. So, yeah, the degradation being a,

risk for long-term productivity from an agricultural standpoint. We hear about planting cover crops as a way to protect soil health. How do cover crops help soils from these extreme events? So that's something I've done a lot of research on, and I'll just take a step back for those folks who aren't familiar with what a cover crop is. It's basically a plant that you would grow when the soil would otherwise be bare to protect it. And so what that means in a place like the corn belt, you know, typically farmers are going to plant corn or soybean in the spring in April or May. They're going to harvest in September or October.

And that's another five or six months of the year when the soil is left bare, unprotected. You're missing an opportunity to do what plants do, which is convert sunlight into carbon. Right. So what a cover crop does is to cover the soil. in that bare period to protect it from things like soil erosion. You're adding carbon into the system when you're doing that. Some of the work that I've done has showed that cover crops can increase water infiltration, so that's the rate at which water can enter the soil.

So you're getting all of those benefits in terms of soil protection and really to building resilience and buffering a soil against things like flood. and droughts. I want to bring on another guest who's studying how rising temperatures affect the soil microbiome, all those bacteria and microbes that live in the soil. Kristen DeAngelis is a microbiologist at the University of Massachusetts and Amherst. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. So you've been studying an experiment in a forest that's been going on for 20 years where the soil has been artificially heated that entire time. You found that there were spikes and how the microbes were responding. Tell us about that.

Yeah, so I've been working on this long-term climate change manipulation experiment that was established in 1991 by a collaborator of mine, Jerry Malillo, and they're heating the soil five degrees above ambient. This is a forest soil in central Massachusetts, and it's heated year-round. I don't know, the way that they heat is through these buried resistance cables, and it's the same technology that the NFL uses in, like, the football games in the north. to keep the snow from accumulating on the field. But there are buried thermisters that keep the experimental plots heated 5 degrees warmer compared to the controls. And over this 27 years, all of this carbon has been lost as CO2. And of course, that's a positive feedback to climate.

And we're really interested in how the microbes are responding to this degradation of soil. And how are they responding? Well, they're more active. As you would imagine, you heat up a system. it becomes more active. And the biomass has decreased, the microbial biomass, and soils are living. And they're living because the microbes that live there. And it's mostly bacteria and fungi. And what's interesting and where I come in, as a microbiologist, really interested in bacteria, is that the biomass is decreased in these warm soils, but they're really decreased because the fungi are

declining. And the bacteria, in terms of their numbers, seem to be doing okay. And that's really this next research project of ours is to try and understand how is it that the bacteria are seem to be resilient to this warming and drying effect. Now, I know that you both spend a lot of time thinking about the soil. What are the questions that we need to be asking when you think about the health of the soil in the next 50 years? And, Kristen, you can go first. The questions that we need to be asking about about soil? Yeah. What do we need to worry about? What are the questions what we should, I know you're doing research on it? What's the long-term prognosis? Right. So, you know, keeping soil healthy,

and I think there's a big debate among academics and farmers right now about how to sort of define what makes a healthy soil, but keeping carbon in the soil, promoting practices that promote soil conservation, really just raising awareness of soil as a limiting natural resource. So, you know, questions to be asking is, some, you know, can you promote planting that will keep erosion at bay, promote soil formation, and supporting people in your community who are doing those sorts of things like our organic farmers in my community, for example. Well, Andrea, how do you bring more, you say you thank us for paying attention to this, and we think this is something we should be doing, as a matter of fact.

How do you bring more attention to people talking about, hey, you want to eat, you've got to have soil, you know? Yeah, I think, you know, if everyone who's listening today goes out and tells three of their friends about the imperative of soil and that we're losing soil at a rate much faster that we can form it or that it's naturally formed, go tell your friends, raising awareness about that, you know, the base of people who live in rural areas and who are farming, you know, every survey that comes up tends to show that those numbers are declining, which I don't necessarily think is a good thing because we need to have our urban food eaters. You know, we all sit down to eat three times a day, really thinking about how they can support all of those things. And, you know, I appreciate the organic debate, organic versus conventional.

I don't know that I appreciate it. I think it's much more nuanced than that. I think there's a lot of other ways that we can support producers, trying to, I think a lot about just getting continuous cover of the soil. So doing things like having more cover crops, more perennial crops, agroforestry, which is getting trees into landscape. So what are more of those things that we can do? So we've got to move kind of beyond just organic as one option.

But I think that consumers being more aware and thinking about how they can support food producers in soil conservation, because we do all need to eat three times a day. Can they learn anything from their home garden plot about any of this? Andrea or Kristen? I mean, is that a helpful thing to do? Have a garden, you're more aware? I would say so. I mean, I think gardening is a lot of fun.

It's really humbling, too. It's not easy to have to grow your own food. So if you're thinking about, you know, ways that you can use less tillage in your own garden or do things like mulching to keep weeds down or conserve moisture, I mean, I think, you know, those are principles that farmers who grow crops on a larger scale are thinking about. as well. So I think it's a humbling experience and they can learn some of the basics of soil management in that way too. Yeah, we've talked about the water and next time we talk to you, we're going to talk about

the wildfires happening out west and how they affect the soil and the soil structure. We've run out of time about that, but that's certainly an interesting topic to talk about also. I would like to thank my guest, Dr. Andrea Bache, agricultural scientist at the University of Nebraska and Lincoln, Dr. Christian D'Angolus, a microbiologist, University of University of University of Massachusetts and Amherst. After the break, imagine being a plant. You're minding your own business, and then someone takes a bite out of you.

Turns out the plants, don't just sit there and let it happen. We'll tell you what, how they feel? Well, you'll hear. Stay with us. We'll come back after the break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. It's not easy being green.

I'm talking about plants. You're dependent on very specific environmental conditions. You can't relocate. in search of water? And oh yeah, everybody wants to eat you, right? What's a motionless organism to do? Well, if you're a plant, you do have some options. You can slow your growth to consume fewer resources. You can develop a deeper root system to get at the water table better. And if a caterpillar is nibbling on your leaf or you as a leaf, you can produce noxious substances, poisons, bad-tasting chemicals to protect yourself. But one mystery that is a little bit of a leaf. But one mystery that is a little bit of the leaf, you can produce. You can produce a leaf. You can produce a leaf. You can produce a

that has puzzled botanists is how a leaf that's been bitten into can tell the rest of the plant to amp up this chemical warfare. Now, new research published in Science Points with startling video to a calcium ion signal that travels like electricity to the rest of the plant. You can see it move like a wave from the wounded leaf through the capillaries to other leaves. And you can see it on our website at ScienceFriday.com slash plants. Might make you think twice about picking a flower. Here to talk more about this leafy distress signal and more from the secret lives of greenery

is Simon Gilroy, Professor of Botany at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He's co-author on the new research. Welcome, Dr. Gilroy. Good afternoon. Why got you looking for this signal in the first place? Well, so the researchers who work with me, the team, we're all interested in one set of questions, which is how to plant, know what's going on in the world around them. They have to be really good at it because they're literally rooted to the spot. They have to know what's attacking them, what's happening to them. They have to know things like up from down, a lot of signals being processed. But there's that just fascinating question. They are obviously really good at doing it. But how do they, how do they, you know, like using the words of how we interact with the world, how do they know? And how do

do they think? How do they turn information into understanding? So we've been trying to piece together the machinery, the cellular machinery, let them do that for many, many years. And one of the other things that we're very interested in is this universal role for the calcium iron. And you can think of it as it's just a signal that biology worked out a long time ago, how to use, and uses it everywhere. So the reason your heart is beating at the moment is because flashes of calcium are being released. into cells and they're causing contractions. It's the same thing inside plants that calcium carries information. So we were just interested in putting those two things together.

So what happens when the plant gets bitten into it releases a spike and it tells the other parts of the plant is somebody eating me? Yeah, yeah. So that was the sort of the miraculous thing that we managed to visualize. So imagine a caterpillar chewing on the end of one leaf and think about seeing the alive seeing the electrical charges and this calcium iron. We generated some plants that let us visualize that. And when you chomp on the leaf, you trigger a really quick spike in calcium, and then

it shoots through the rest of the plant. And for a plant biologist, it is really, really booking. It's going about as fast as we can imagine. So it's going in the range of millimeters a second, which is a, for a plant signal, it's a fantastically fast signal. You know, it almost sounds like It has its own nervous system like animals do. Yeah, so inevitably we start talking in the language of sort of nervous system because that's the context that we can really understand. But plants don't have nerves. We should just set the goalposts of that.

They do not have nerves and they don't have the anatomical structure that we would call a brain. But they still have to accomplish the same kind of things. They, you know, if somebody starts chewing on the tip of your arm, you generate a signal that moves through the rest of your body. And your body then responds to it. And usually it's by going like, ow, and moving away. Plants have to do the same kind of thing. They can't respond by movement, but they've got to have the same kinds of systems in there. It's just that the cells that they're built around are going to be very, very different from a mammalian nervous system.

Hmm. And the point is to what? To tweak up the defense system of the plant, telling the rest of the plant, you know, this is happening? Oh, yeah, plants are awesome. They have a set of defenses that are sitting there. If they were, if those defenses were on all the time, the plant would be spending a lot of its resources just defending itself for no reason. So it waits for a signal of like, oh, part of me is being eaten. I would really like the rest of me not to be eaten. signals course through the plant body, and they switch on a whole bunch of defenses, things like toxic chemicals, things like proteins that prevent insects from digesting food, but they're inducible defenses, because that way you only switch them on when you need them. So is the plant, when I chop into a carrot, is it still sending out that alarm signal? You know, absolutely everyone is asking me that, and the answer to it is absolutely. Yes. The carrot is alive and when you're eating it, it is sending off those signals.

Then the other analogous question always comes along is that, well, then, when do I think about that when I'm eating a carrot? No, I think the carrot just tastes really good. It's, yeah. Well, we know we talk about this communication system underground between plants. It's called the world wood system, worldwide wood system. Yeah, yeah. Are the plants talking to each other also? I think, yeah. Yeah, I think that there is some very good data on that. There's some very good researchers have looked at how information could be exchanged,

not within an individual, which is kind of where our research goes, but between individuals and things like volatile chemicals. So if you chew up a leaf, it will release chemicals. Those chemicals are volatile. They waft around in the air. other plants can detect them and switch on defenses. So plants have these mechanisms to pass information between them. Absolutely, yeah.

Are there other kinds of signals we might be able to find in plants based on another kind of stress? I mean, what does a plant do if it's too hot, for example? Yeah, there's fantastic questions because we are in the discovery phase of science here. We really don't know. We know a lot of the signals that plants respond to, and we can kind of describe how it changes their growth. And in a lot of cases, we can describe things like genes which get switched on and off. But how the information is passed throughout the plant and processed, we don't know. Things like temperature shock.

One of the I'm particularly interested in is how the plant sense up from down, all of those kinds of signals. We are just at the beginning of finding it out. Our number 8447-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFry, 844 SciTalk on the phones. But I'm interested in hearing that you're just beginning to learn this stuff. I mean, we've been studying plants for eons. Yeah, it's not that we don't know a lot about plants, and it's not that the researchers up until now have been sort of like sleeping on the job,

that we know a tremendous amount about them. But it's that technology that keeps on advancing. And so now we have technology where we can do things like measure the level of every single gene in a plant. And now the technology that we've been capitalizing on is fairly recent technology, which allows us to put proteins into plants, engineer plants to make these proteins, that let us actually see changes in real time inside the plant. So we're layering on more and more of the details and the phenomena onto this enormously rich background, which has come from all of the previous research.

Okay, let's talk about what you'd like to know now. What would you like to know most? So part of the kinds of questions that I'm interested in are at the nuts and bolts level of the machines that make it work. Inside each of the cells within a plant are a bunch of molecular machines, proteins that make this system work. and our research has just chipped to wet, one little part of it, which is a group of proteins called glutamate-like receptors, that give us an inkling about how the machinery is working. One of the things we'd like to do is be able to put the details in there

to be able to build the map of how it works with the resolution that we have, for instance, about how a nerve works. Because then we can begin to tinker with the system, and you can imagine that if we understand how the information is being propagated through the plant, we may be able to preemptively switch that system on in a very intelligent way to protect the plant when we want it to be protected. It's funny you mentioned glutamate because glutamate is what's all all through the brain too, the nervous system, too, isn't it? Yeah, this is one of those great and sort of amazing parallels that plants are using glutamate and the proteins that perceive it, which are very, very similar to the proteins that perceive glutamate in the nervous system.

So there aren't any nerves, but they kind of have the... same theme behind what's going on. Wow. I understand you're also doing research on how plants respond to things in spaceflight, in space. Yeah, yeah. So actually I'm... What fascinates you about that? Yeah. So I'm actually doing the recording of this in Kennedy Space Center, and we're down here getting ready to send some plants up onto the International Space Station. Space is just a fantastic place to put biology, because, you know, if you think of

the evolutionary history of all biology, it's been on the surface of the earth at one times gravity. And you can't get away from it. Nothing has evaded one times gravity as far as its history until we went into space. And so we can now remove gravity from the equation, go into the weightless environment of, for instance, the space station, and ask what was gravity contributing to biology? Because when we remove it, things that suddenly don't work, they become a big deal. so I was like, oh, that's what gravity is regulating on Earth. And also then if we're going to spend any time in space,

and I mean an extended period of time in space, we're going to have to have a life support system that comes with us. And plants and microbes keep humans alive on Earth. And so the question is, can we take that machine with us, that biology of plants and microbes, and make them work in space? So there are just fundamental things about growing a plant in Zee. zero gravity that not only have to do with how the plant stock grows, but how the water, I imagine, right?

Yeah, water is influential and it needs gravity for it to work and sort of seeped down into the soil. It's not seeping anymore. Yeah, I always go, if you think of the simplest thing that you can imagine you do with your potted plant, which is that you water it. So you have a pot, you have a watering can, you turn the watering can on the side, gravity pulls the water out into the soil and pulls that water down through the soil. and now go into space.

None of that's going to work. You've got your watering can, you turn it on the side, nothing comes out. So how do you physically get the water into the soil? Well, we use things like syringes and pumps. And they work really well. You can push the water into the soil. And you don't use soil. You use a bunch of different matrices, things like clay particles.

But then weird things start happening that you're not prepared for unless you sort of understand the physics of what's going. on, but basically once you've removed gravity, water becomes really sticky and really creepy. So it'll stick to surfaces very well, and it will also creep along those surfaces. So now imagine that you've watered your plant, and you've added just a little bit too much water. And so that water now sticks to the, let's say that you have it in some kind of soil. It'll stick to the soil, but it will also start creeping along the surface of the soil, and it'll start creeping up over the surface of the plant,

And eventually, and this has happened during spaceflight, the water will encase the plant. It'll be like a watery glove over the surface of the plant. And that is equivalent to flooding the plant. That's like trying to grow your plant underwater, and that does not work. I hate it when that happens. This is Science Friday. I'm reflected this, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Wow, you know, there's the kinds of things.

I'm a gardener. I think about gardening all the time. I would never think that that water was going to do that. But also plants need the right mixture. Right, don't they carbon dioxide and respiration and all that kind of stuff? Yeah. In a different environment. Yeah.

That's all part of the equation you have to figure out. Yep. And so I like the Earth. I think it's a great place to live. I'm happy with how it works. And once you remove something like gravity and move into the realm of spaceflight, a whole bunch of the features, which we really, really do take for, granted, and you go down to your garden and you look at your plants and they're growing very

happily. A lot of the things which are going on don't work quite as well in space. And also I also think the plants, biology is fantastic. Biology copes with going into space. Astronauts, their physiology has changed, but they're able to cope and deal with that new environment. Plants grow okay in space. It's not that they don't grow. And biology has this fantastic capacity to sense its environment and adapt. And that's what we're seeing. Do plants taste differently when they're growing in space? At two levels, yes.

So the taste of plants is partly about how they grow. So how quickly they grow, the nutrients they take up, how much water they have, how much light, the plant itself. But also, you know when you're on a plane and food tastes differently because you're on the plane, that same phenomenon kind of happens in the space station. So it's a bit like having a head cold.

And so those two things play off with each other. How the plants grow and how you as an astronaut are operating change everything a little bit. So you're going to try to figure out how gravity exactly affects how plants grow in space and possibly figure out maybe will plants grow on Mars, for example, the soil? Fertile enough? Is it? They're all great questions. to which we kind of know the answer, but you know, like no one's been to Mars, so we haven't tried it,

but there's water there. There's minerals, although we probably would have to bring some fertilizer. But some of the characteristic of Martian soil, the Martian regalith, is we would have to deal with. So it's very salty, and it has a bunch of chemicals in there because of the weird chemistry, a bunch of chemicals called perchlorates, and those are weed killers. So that might be a small issue But we can get rid of them We can wash them away So yeah

But you know one of the things We think about when we go to Mars Is bringing part of Earth to Mars We don't want to contaminate Mars Can you sterilize a seed Enough that it wouldn't contaminate But still grow if you wanted to test it out on Mars So we can absolutely

Sterilize these on As far as the outside of the seed is concerned Which does pretty good job We can get them to be sterile. But the thing is that the way that plants grow on earth is they're in a community, and microbes are part of that community. And divorcing plants and microbes is probably not the smartest thing to do because there's a tremendous amount of interactions that make plants grow well

that come from the microbial populations in the soil. So that may just not be the correct strategy to go on down. That's a great point because I wasn't thinking about that. We talk a lot on this program about the soil microbiome as being necessary for plants to grow. And you don't have a soil microbiome in the natural space environment, do you? Do you have to create that in the space station? No, so you can grow plants under sterile conditions without microbes, and they'll grow. You know, plants, like I say, biology is fantastic, and they will grow.

But it's all questions of sustainability and nutrient, utilize. how well they're growing. We've only been growing in plants and space intensively for a few years, so we're not really certain that we're good gardeners yet. Okay. Well, we'll find out. Well, thank you, Dr. Gilroy, for taking time to be with us today. My pleasure.

Simon Gilroy, Professor of Botany at the University of Wisconsin and Madison. When we come back, we're going to take you inside the Grand Championship of Science Competitions, the International Science and Engineering Fair. Stay with us. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. Were you a science fair kid? I was. I remember my 11th grade science fair project. I made a little device that read punch cards. You don't know what punch cards are. Well, if you don't know, I really can't tell you, but if you do, you will remember.

I actually won second prize in the physics category, and I had no thoughts of ever entering one of the national science fairs, let alone the mother of all science fairs, the International Science and Engineering Fair, or ISF. If you've never heard of it, students prepare and compete against other high schools from around the world. And the science, they're doing it's way above my head. It's really on another level. And one recent Grand Award winner actually developed a method of killing cancer cells. ISF is like the Olympics of science fairs. There's competition. There's science geekery.

Sounds like the makings of a great movie, right? Well, a new documentary aptly titled Science Fair, follows a group of students, each one more brilliant than the last one, who set out to compete and win at ISF. Christina Konstantini is a producer and director of Science Fair, the new film out in theaters this week. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm so excited to be here. Well, did you compete in a science fair ever? That's right, yeah. In high school, I competed two times, and it totally changed my life, and I became obsessed with this little, weird, fun world of science fair nerds. And ever since I was 14 years old, I knew this would make a great documentary. And then I became a documentary filmmaker. And so here we are with the... So it was,

it was your own experience then that you drew upon. That's exactly right. It was, I went to a high school, like most high schools in America, that really celebrated sports. And science fair was the one place where I felt like I was really celebrated like a football player, you know, like a rock star. And this fair in particular is amazing. It's 2,000 kids from around the world from 78 different countries, some of the most brilliant minds that you'll ever meet, but they're also teenagers. So they're going to dances and they have crushes and, you know, they're also teenagers. So it's a lot of fun. How far did you get when you were in ISEF? Did you actually get that high up? Well, I placed fourth in my category in behavioral science.

Wow. That's pretty good. Thank you. Okay, the movie is terrific. It's a great film. I want to talk about how you chose the schools and the students you were going to follow. Sure. So we follow nine students from all over the world. Some students from kind of the Yankees of the Science Fair, you know, the teams that are well-resourced and have great coaches.

So I wanted to show kind of the diversity. And my co-director, Darren Foster and I spent a lot of time. interviewing kids from around the world. But we wanted to show, you know, the Yankees, the really well-resourced schools, as well as some of the schools with less resources and some kids from backgrounds that are not as privileged. So we actually went to a tiny town in the center of Brazil,

and it was a very poor town. And for them, making it to the International Science Fair was life-changing. I want to bring on a contestant, Robbie Barrett, a former ISF student featured in the film. Welcome to Science Friday. Hey, thanks for having me. What got you interested in?

How did you get into ISF into the competition? So to get to ISF, you need to win your state fair or a regional fair. So I got through by winning my state fair. And you mentioned in the movie you talked about you actually struggled in math in high school, though, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, I mean, I think my main problem with that was because it's math classes, it's super structured. So I can't like, you know, if it's not interesting, if it's just like, you know, do 20 math problems or something, I'm not very good at that. But if it's like a project where the first year I went to ISF, I had a number theory project.

But if it's, you know, something where I can sort of do my own pace and do stuff that I'm interested in, then I'm really good at it. Now, I remember from my own day back in the day when I was doing science fairs just in high school level, the competition was amazing. I mean, the pressure, I can only imagine Robbie and Christina what it must be like at this level. Robbie, what's it like? Well, yeah, there are definitely some people that are super competitive, but there are also, you know, there's a bunch of really nice, like-minded people at ISF. And I think I got along with most people really well. And Christina? Yeah, I think, you know, there are a lot of different kinds of kids.

There are kids who are Uber competitive and who are there to win. And for them, this is like their Olympics. And then there are kids probably like Robbie and I were when we, you know, I'm from Wisconsin and I had no idea that this international science fair existed. So when I got there, I was just happy to be there, you know, just like, just amazed that something could exist at this scope. It's really just incredible to see rows and rows and rows of, projects of brilliant kids. It's super, super inspiring.

Just want to get our listeners if they want to tell us about their run-ins with science bears. 844-724-8255. I was also impressed by, you seem to follow one of the teachers in the schools and how she was shepherding her classmates in there. I think she was from Jericho High School, was she not? That's right. Yeah, Dr. Serena McCalla from Jericho, New York. Yeah, and as someone who grew up in Long Island, I know exactly what Jericho High School is at a great school. But you spent a lot of time having her students practice their presentations. I thought that was really, really interesting. Yeah, she is, what I love about Jericho High School is they treat science fair like the rest of America treats football.

It's really, she is an amazing coach, and she drills them over and over again. and she finds out what they're interested in, and then she reads all of the journals that she can find that are in that same area so she can help her kids as much as she possibly can. And she's kind of an amazing model of teaching. She's incredible. And one interesting aspect I thought about that

is while she's trying to teach her students how to be good at public speaking and presentation, that's really the, we talk about scientists or researchers today, we talk about that being one of their greatest shortcomings. Yeah. Is it, I think selling your presentation. Yeah, that's exactly right. I think, you know, I think Anjali says it that part of science fair is being a good salesman.

So, you know, you have to figure out how to sell your project, how to communicate ideas to experts, how to convince them that you've done important work. And I think they're great life skills. Even, you know, I didn't become a scientist, but many of the less. lessons I learned from Science Fair, I think I use a lot. And Robbie, what lessons have you taken away from this competition? So, well, I mean, I'm coming from, I grew up in West Virginia, so I thought that I was pretty disadvantaged. But when you go to Science Fair and you see all of these kids from all over,

like from Brazil and from, you know, over in, like, lesser fortunate countries over, you know, in Asia and, you know, towards, like, the Middle East, it really is eye-opening and humbling that, you know, All of these kids have so many, like, shortcomings and have overcome so much, but, you know, they're competing on international science fair. And a lot of them have already won, like, their national fair. So it was a bit humbling, and in my perspective, definitely shifted. As someone who has not gotten into a college and still looking to get into college, there was some of the contestants were looking as the science fair as a gateway to open up their way of getting into college. have you been able to overcome not be you're not getting into a college and what have you been doing since graduating high school so um first of i i really wasn't looking at science fair as you know a reason

to get into college i was just doing it because you know it's fun and and it was an excuse for me to work on projects that that i really loved um but as for what i've been doing outside of you know going to college which which i'm not uh so right now i'm working in a research lab at stanford i'm working in a Prevesh Katri's lab. It's more biology-oriented, but I'm working a lot with artificial intelligence pertaining to that. Can I brag about Robbie? Please go ahead, Christine. I know he won't brag for himself. He actually has an art show in Paris that's going up. He was on the cover of Bloomberg Business Week with AI-generated paintings. He's doing, he's guest lecturing at Stanford. He hasn't got into college, but he's doing incredible, amazing things. I'm not sure he needs college at this point.

I was going to say, if you can get into ISAF and survive that a couple of times and go out on your own, maybe college is highly overrated. That's right. Well, yeah, Robbie? Well, I do, I do, I do really still want to go to college. As Christina said, I'm working a lot more at the intersection of artificial intelligence and art. So I've been thinking about going to art school, but that's, I'm, I'm and that is also a problem because they don't really offer math classes, and I need math to work in the medium of AI. So it's a bit tricky, but I'm figuring it out. But I do still want to go to college.

I'm not writing that completely off. Tell us about one of your projects. You were there a few times. Let me bring one up. In the film they show you demonstrating a song lyric generator. Does that look kind of cool? So that isn't my science fair project. That's just an art project that I was doing on this side.

So basically I use neural networks, which are a sort of machine learning. But the short brief idea is with typical programming, you think of, you know, programmers sitting down and coding rules into the computer, maybe about writing songs, like, you know, the different lines have to rhyme or whatever. But with neural networks, what happens is you can just show the neural network a bunch of data, and it will figure out the patterns in that data, right? And then you can use that to generate more. So in this case, the data is I used all of Kanye West's rap lyrics,

and I sort of got the neural network to look at all the patterns in those and then generate more rap lyrics. Wow. I want to talk about one of the more interesting, I mean, it all wasn't interesting, but one of the more poignant moments in the film is the time where one of the students in the film who won the top prize in her category,

she didn't have a science teacher as her mentor. She had to get her school's football coach to sponsor her. And when she wins this top prize in her category, she's not even recognized by her high school for winning, Christina. Yeah, I mean, Keshvia's story is one of the most heartbreaking to me. But she is a brilliant, brilliant young woman. And I think the silver lining of the story, despite the fact the high school she's in doesn't recognize.

that there's this figure of Coach Schmidt, who, despite knowing nothing about science, he even, you know, watching him try to understand what he's done is pretty funny. But he is incredibly supportive. And so he does whatever she needs him to do in order for her project to go far. And he's even, you know, the head of the feminist club at this high school. He is head football coach, but he's so much more, I think, to the kids who need his support. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios talking about science fairs and talking about the new film, Christina Konstantini, producer and director of science fair. Where can we see this film when it starts coming out, Christina? Well, it opens tonight in New York City at the Landmark 57. It will open September 21st in Los Angeles and many other cities around the city.

the country on September 28th. And if you look at sciencefairfilm.com, you can find a screening list there. How did you go from being an ISF participant to becoming a filmmaker? Was it a torturous road? I was, you know, I was in the social sciences, so I've always been interested in people and how people think and why people do what they do. So it wasn't a hugely, but in college, I made the shift from social sciences to journalism. But I've still really appreciated, and I'm so grateful for my experiences that I had as a high schooler in Science Fair.

And so to me, this is a bit of a love letter to that world. So you consider this film to be a celebration of science fairs? Exactly, yeah. I think they do wonderful things for kids, whether or not kids become scientists or not. I think they teach so many important skills. And I wouldn't be here without. science fair. Do you feel that it's, some people, some people feel that it's not right that we should

treat science as a competition, you know, it's okay for sports or debating team, but not science. How do you respond to those folks? You know, I think actually Robbie in the movie says it best, which is that if you think that science fair is about winning, you're totally missing the point of science fair. And there is a competitive nature to it, and I do think, you know, whether we like it or not, A competition gets kids in the doors. I think kids are competitive, and it's certainly part of why I did it. But in the end, I found it to be such a meaningful experience, and just the self-exploit, or the exploration and innovation that comes out of these fairs is absolutely remarkable.

And a lot of it is collaborative in nature. There are a lot of group projects. So I think you also have, you have competition, but you also have a ton of collaboration. Rob, are your thoughts? I totally agree with that. I totally agree with that. I mean, if you think about Science Fair, like, if you're just going there to compete, it's not the point. I mean, I made a lot of really great connections at Science Fair.

I got a bunch of really good feedback on my projects. And, you know, well, people are there just to put it on their college applications. There's a lot more that you can get out of it. do you think that enough people have I guess promoted science fairs enough I mean we hear about the big ISEF one are there enough science fairs in colleges or in high school do you think

well I mean at my high school at my high school nobody knew about science fair I think I might I think I was the first person from my high school to go to ISF but um but yeah no it was I mean at least at my high school it was wildly unheard of. But that did change after I went the first time. There was like a science fair club that one of the science teachers started to try and get more participation. But I feel like,

I feel like it definitely is something that needs more coverage, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I think the science, the international science fair just lost their primary funder last year in the Siemens competition, which is a very big science fair. Also is closing down after decades. Oklahoma State Science Fair just lost their funding. And I think, you know, we're at a time when we need to be reminded of the importance of these kinds of programs for kids. And so part of my desire for doing this movie was to remind people just how much this means to so many kids. Yeah, it's a good way to end it. And we'll be hoping folks go to see Science Fair opening tonight in New York and then across the country. Christina Konstantini is producer and director

of Science Fair, and Robbie Barrett is a two-time former ISF participant now working at Stanford. One last thing before we go, Cy Fry is here in Salt Lake City because we've got a very special show planned tomorrow night at Saturday night at the Eccles Theater downtown.

We're going to talk about exotic organisms living in forest canopies like my favorite, the orchids. We'll take you along on a dino dig in southern Utah and there's a lot more. It's going to be a great geek evening. We're going to have conversations science and live music.

You don't want to miss it. There are just a few tickets left. More info at ScienceFronty.com slash Salt Lake City. That is Saturday night. It's going to be great at the Eccles Theater. Be there or B.Square. B.J. Leiterman compose our theme music.

Our thanks today to KUER for welcoming us today, Michael Havee, Lewis Downey, and Tim Slover. And a heartfelt farewell to our departing intern, Lucy Wong. Today is her last day. Our thanks to her, she will be missed. Good luck, Lucy. I'm Ira Flato in Salt Lake City.