Science Friday - SpaceX’s Starship Completes In-Orbit Engine Test | Resuscitating Shipwrecked Rye Seeds

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

This was the sixth test launch of the Starship vehicle, which could eventually carry humans and cargo to the moon. It was extremely loud. Also, divers have recovered seeds of a long-lost rye variety from a 146-year-old shipwreck in Lake Huron. Scientists hope to bring it back to life.SpaceX’s Starship Completes In-Orbit Engine TestOn Tuesday, the rocket company SpaceX conducted another test flight of its Starship spacecraft. In the uncrewed mission, the sixth test of the system, the company was seeking to test its ability to restart the Starship engines while in orbit, a function that’s necessary for in-space maneuvering. The rocket did launch successfully, and the engine test worked. However, at the last minute the company elected not to try to repeat an October maneuver in which it caught a returning SuperHeavy rocket booster at the launch tower, citing safety concerns.SciFri’s Charles Bergquist joins guest host Kathleen Davis to talk about the launch, and related research into the tremendous sound created by the system’s launch and reentry. They also discuss other stories from the week in science, including the discovery of a saber-toothed kitten in Siberian permafrost, efforts to use light to help destroy PFAS chemicals, a company using Pokemon Go game data to train an AI, and more.Michigan-Based Team To Resuscitate Shipwrecked Rye SeedsIn 1878, a wooden schooner named the James R. Bentley set sail from Chicago to Buffalo, New York. But strong winds and rough waters damaged the ship, and it sank to the bottom of Lake Huron. The crew was saved, but the ship’s cargo—a large shipment of rye—sank with it. In the years since the shipwreck, that particular variety of rye has faded out of existence.Now, almost 150 years later, a Michigan-based team is trying to bring the long-lost rye back to life. They dove to the shipwreck, retrieved a tube full of seeds, and are planning to use gene technology to recreate the rye variety. Their goal is to encourage farmers to grow it, so that distillers can use it to make whiskey.SciFri producer Kathleen Davis talks with Dr. Eric Olson, professor of wheat breeding and genetics at Michigan State University, and Chad Munger, founder and CEO of Mammoth Distilling.Transcripts for each segment will be available 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.

Around 150 years ago, a ship sank in Lake Huron. On board, a massive shipment of rye seeds. I said, is that actually what's in that ship? And is there any left? And he said, absolutely. That boat is full of nothing but grain. It's Friday, November 22nd. Happy Science Friday.

I'm SciFri producer Rasha Aridi. Later in the episode, we're going to dive into how a Michigan-based team is trying to revive this shipwrecked rye and use it to make whiskey. But first, let's check in on this week's Science News. Here's CyFRI's Kathleen Davis. On Tuesday, rocket company SpaceX conducted another test flight of its starship spacecraft. The rocket did launch successfully, but the company decided not to try some landing acrobatics. Joining me to talk about that and other stories from this week in science is CyFRI's own Charles Berkwist. Hey, Charles. Hey, Kathleen.

So tell me more about this launch. Yeah, so this was the sixth test flight of SpaceX's Starshipcraft. This was uncrewed, so no people aboard. And it lasted about an hour. And the big question that they were looking at here was whether or not they could restart the engines quell in orbit, which obviously is something you need to be able to do to make big course and orbit changes. And it turned out that engine restart worked. So they didn't hit all of their goals for launch, though, right?

Yeah, so I mean, this was kind of a stretch goal, you might say. You might have seen back in October this maneuver where the booster stage, the super heavy booster, returned to the launch tower and was caught upright, almost like a pair of giant chopsticks clamping onto the sides of it. A repeat of that move was on the table for this launch, but at the last minute, they made a choice not to do that and instead let the booster splash down into the ocean. Okay, I see. So it's my understanding you have a related. story about Starship. Tell me about that. Yeah. So, I mean, this Starship super heavy booster combination is big, really big. And launching that takes a lot of rocket power. This thing has 33 engines. Wow. If you've ever been near even a normal rocket launch, you know that they're loud. So researchers asked just how loud is a Starship launch. And it turns out a team from BYU placed a bunch of sensors around the area to monitor some previous launch attempts. Okay, so what did they find?

Well, big secret here, it's really, really loud. I mean, not so much a sound is like a force. Even 10 kilometers away, we're talking rock concert levels of sound here. And at 20 kilometers, I think table saw, snowblower, something like that, and 30 to 35 kilometers away, you're still looking at sound levels like a vacuum cleaner or a hair dryer. Wow. I mean, this might be a silly question, but aren't all rockets really loud? Yeah, I mean, sure, it's a rocket. Of course it's loud.

But this is really louder than many other launches. SpaceX has a smaller launch vehicle that they use a lot called Falcon. This Starship Super Heavy Combination launch was the equivalent of 10 Falcon rocket launches. Wow. And the estimates are that the noise is equivalent to around five launches of the space launch system. That's the launch vehicle underd. development for part of NASA's Artemis program. I mean, does that level of noise affect anything? Yeah, I mean, it could, right? This is the kind of sound pressure that can actually start to cause cracks in

walls or windows. After the October test launch, there were some reports of property damage in the town nearby the launch site. Those haven't been really officially tabulated. But there's also the question of whether this might be harmful to wildlife nearby, especially as the frequency of these launches, ramps up and they use it more. So something to keep an eye on as this goes forward. Let's stay in space for our next story. There's something more distant in the news? Yeah, this is a story coming out of the European Southern Observatory's very large

telescope interferometer project. They were able to take a zoomed-in close-up image of a star called W-O-H-G-64. What's significant here is this is a star 160,000. light years away. Wow. Yeah, it's not even in our own Milky Way galaxy. It's in another galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. Okay, so we were able to get this close-up image. What did it look like? Yeah, you see this kind of glowing, egg-shaped ring surrounding a kind of fuzzy thing. And astronomers think that what they're seeing is gas being driven off from the star. It's shedding all this gas rapidly as it moves through the last stages of its life. And some of the

astronomers think that this star is dying and could someday become a supernova. Huh. Okay. So how were they able to even get this image? Yeah, I mean, one factor here is just advances in telescope technology. This instrument is actually four big telescopes in Chile that can combine together into one interferometer instrument to see extra small things. But, I mean, it's not really cheating, but this star is a red super giant and is something like 2,000 times the size of our sun. So you're not seeing our sun in a distant galaxy, but this is still a super impressive result. So, yeah, this is a very large object, to put it mildly.

Yes, very large. Okay, so back here on Earth for our next story, there are advances in dealing with the chemicals known as PFAS chemicals or Forever Chemicals. Tell me about this, Charles. Right. So these are a group of chemicals called perfluoro and polyfluoral alcohol substances. Basically, that means that they have a lot of carbon-fluorine bonds in them. And those bonds are really strong chemically. On the one hand, that's part of what makes these chemicals useful for a lot of things like flame retardants, stain repellents, non-stick coatings.

But it also means that they're very hard to break down. And that's what these two papers in nature this week are discovering. The researchers found that by using catalysts that were activated by light, they were able to break that tough bond at pretty mild temperatures. Normally these bonds take a lot of energy to break. And that's usually in the form of heat. You've got to really crank up the heat to get this bond to break. But the light-activated catalysts were able to get over that energy hurdle a lot easier.

So obviously, PFS chemicals are a big problem. They're on a lot of people's minds. Is this a possible solution? So this is a start. Neither of these catalyst systems is really ready for prime time yet. importantly, one of the big troubles, as you know, with the PFS chemicals right now is when they get into people's water supply. But these particular catalysts don't work all that well in water. So there are some challenges to be worked out here to make this really useful. All right. So maybe a piece of the puzzle, but we still need a lot more solutions. So turning from light to sound, there is a study this week about how whales here. Tell me about this, Charles.

Yeah. So this is published this week in science, and I don't know about you, but I usually think of whale noises as mainly being low frequency sounds with those incredible songs that they do, right? But in this research, the scientists were actually able to give two minky whales a hearing test, and they found that they can hear at higher frequencies than they previously thought. Charles, I got to ask, how do you give a whale a hearing test? So I don't know if you ever had to do this in like elementary school. You strap the big clunky headphones. on the head, and you raise the flipper when you hear the peep on each side. No, this is not what they did. First, they had to safely catch the whales. They found a natural channel that ran in between two islands in Norway. The migrating whales tended to swim through. And in this area, they set up a system of net barriers to temporarily restrain two adolescent Mickey whales. Then they put electrodes on the surface of their skin in the place of those big clunky headphones.

So this is a non-invasive procedure. And they played sounds at the whales and watched the electrical activity. And they found that the Minkies could detect frequencies as high as 45 to 90 kilohertz, which it's much higher than they previously thought just looking at the ear structures and listening to the sounds that they usually make when they're singing. All right. Well, I understand you have some other animal news this time of the feline variety. Yeah, so this one is terrestrial and a lot older and also super cute.

Researchers uncovered a 35,000-year-old saber-tooth kitten in the Siberian permafrost. They think the kitten was probably around three weeks old when it died. But what's really cool here is how well it was preserved. You can see claws and whiskers and really thursday. thick, soft-looking, dark-brown fur all over it. This was research published in the journal Scientific Reports. And I highly recommend that everybody look up pictures of this kitten because it is extremely cute. But I suspect it's best not to play with a saber-tooth kitten. Am I right, Charles? I'm guessing that would probably not be wise. All right. Well, on the topic of play, there is news

about the Pokemon Go game, which I hadn't heard about in quite some time. What is this news? Yeah, so this is a game that was launched in 2016 that's of a type known as augmented reality. It uses GPS signals combined with images from your mobile phones camera to put game images like Pokemon creatures or other things into real world scenes around you. So if, for example, you went to a place that the game decided contained one of these Pokemon and you looked through your phone's camera, you'd see the Pokemon hiding next to a real tree in your neighborhood, for example, right? The news this week is that Nyantik, the developers of the game, also were using all those millions of pictures that people were taking to train an AI. And they actually used it to develop navigation software. I mean, is there anything that isn't being used to train AI these days? Yeah, I mean, it's really a pressing issue, right?

You think about artists and authors who are upset about their work being slurped into these AI models without their permission. But, you know, here this is pictures taken by. people who thought they were just playing a game. Yeah, well, this is something we'll definitely be seeing more of, I suspect. But we have time for one more story, and this is also on the topic of games. But we're talking about chimps, right? Right. So, you know, play is a thing that the young of many animal species do.

It's a way for kids, children, young, to learn about the world around them and try out things safely. But sadly, most animals stop being quite so playful. as they age. And humans are an exception to that, right? Adult humans still play, whether you're in a softball league or you have a weekly poker night. But now researchers are reporting in the journal Current Biology that it turns out adult chimps also play even when they're older. They found that some chimps like people continue to play throughout their entire lives. And they think this is especially important before engaging in some kind of act that requires collective cooperation. So

play helps you work together. Well, that is just some lovely news to send us off into the weekend. Thank you so much, Charles. You bet, Kathleen. Thanks for having me. SciFri senior producer Charles Berkwist. After the break, how a team of wheat experts and distillers are trying to resuscitate a long lost grain. In 1878, a wooden schooner named the James R. Bentley set sail from Chicago to Buffalo, New York, carrying a large shipment of rye. But strong winds and rough waters damaged the ship, and it sank

to the bottom of Lake Huron. The crew was saved, but the rye went down with the ship. Now, almost 150 years later, a Michigan-based team dove to the shipwreck and rescued the rye seeds, and they're trying to bring the long-lost rye back to life. Joining me to talk about this wonderful story are my guests, Dr. Eric Olson, Professor of wheat breeding and genetics at Michigan State University in East Lansing and Chad Munger, founder and CEO of Mammoth Distilling, based in Bel Air, Michigan. Welcome both of you to Science Friday. Thanks, Kathleen.

Thanks for having us. So, Chad, let's start with why this rye is so special. So tell us a little bit about this rye that went down with the Bentley. So we don't know yet that the rye as a grain is special, but it's historically significant. and fits into a much larger narrative about rye in the state of Michigan, actually. And at Mammoth, we are a traditional, small, very small craft distillery, interested in making things with the most local ingredients that we can, grains and fruits. And we discovered five years ago that Michigan has a very unique history with rye.

In fact, in the early 1900s, Michigan was the largest producer and exporter of rye in North America. And we discovered that the variety of rye, Rosen, that was responsible for all that growing and selling in the early 20th century, was created at Michigan State, was propagated at Michigan State, which is a story unto itself that led us down a rabbit hole of thinking about other ryes and the possibility of creating a rye specifically for the distantly industry, that the story of Rosen rye grabbed a lot of attention from folks in Kentucky and Tennessee who spent their time making a lot of bourbon, which includes rye. People learned about the Rose and Rye project, including a guy named Ross Richardson, who is a professional shipwreck diver, and an expert in Great Lakes Shipwreck history, contacted us and said, I've discovered a shipwreck. This shipwreck is very interesting because it has rye whiskey in the hold. Are you guys interested in talking about what we might do with the shipwreck like this, since you're obviously interested in Michigan agricultural history?

We said, absolutely. And that conversation led to a conversation that we had with him. He said, I have a friend who owns a shipwreck in Lake Huron. which is a shocking thing to hear. Right. And he said, I have some wood from that wreck. And would you be interested in having that wood to use an aging project on some of the whiskey you make? So we absolutely said yes to that.

But when he handed me the box of wood, it had on an 8.5.11 sheet of paper that had been photocopied 150 times and it was barely legible. But the middle of it said, this ship was full of rye grain. And as soon as I saw that written, I said, is that real, Ross? Is that actually what's in that ship? And is there any left? And he said, absolutely. That boat is full of nothing but grain. Wow.

So, you know, the short version of that is we cut a deal with them to have access to some of the rye. And part of that deal was we had to let them go get it for us because that's where the adventurous part of that is what we're all interested in. Yeah. So let's talk about that adventurous part. So it's my understanding you were part of this team. that rescued these seeds. So can you tell us a little bit about what that process was like on the day of the rescue?

It's a dream, right? This is kid stuff. Three divers who do this for a living, Paul Ross and Dusty, right out of central casting, right? They are professional shipwreck divers and when you see pictures of them, you know it immediately. So they brought two boats to Lake Huron and they used things in their garage, I think, to come up with three really ingenious collection tools, which could be. extract grain from the hulls and it could be sealed underwater so that it wouldn't leak out on the way back up and that it could be maintained in one place on ice for the trip back to

East Lansing because 38 degree water with no oxygen keeps things intact. But as soon as those things warm up or come in contact with oxygen, they begin to degrade immediately. In fact, as soon as you got it to the surface, you smelled it and it's really not very pleasant. By the time you got them, Eric, what was the state of the seeds? Oh, it was a mixed bag of sea quality. Now, and it was certainly related to where the grain was situated on the grain pile and in the hold of the ship. On the interior, roughly half of the grain sample was bright in color, very much intact.

You know, you could still distinguish all of the components. You could see the, you know, the embryo end, the brush end, and the grain itself was very much intact. And so they were imbibed with water. So they were a little bit squishy, but, you know, if you accidentally squeezed a seat too hard, you would actually see that starch. Wow. There was a 160-year-old carbohydrates left in that grade. I mean, it was still very much intact. So you get these seeds into the lab. How did you try to get them to germinate? Right. So plants use hormones, just like mammals. You know, they have a hormone system that controls their growth and development. and seed germination is just one of those normal developmental pathways that's triggered by,

in this case, the hormone gibberalic acid. And so this is, you know, folks that work with seeds that are dormant, this is pretty conventional to apply concentrated gibberalic acid to these seeds, just to jumpstart this process. So, you know, we applied it to some of the grain that came directly out of the water. So right away, starting the germination process. But then others, we applied a cold treatment. and then germinating them at room temperature.

It didn't work either. But we were undeterred. We kept going. And so we dried some of the seed down to simulate that natural process of seeds absorbing water from their environment. It's part of the germination process. So we were trying to simulate a more natural germination process. Well, that didn't work either.

It wasn't the end of the road. You know, we weren't done right there. Undeterred. So it wasn't just that we couldn't get the seeds. to germinate. There's, you know, with with the ultimate goal of reviving this rye variety for production in Michigan, you know, we're not, we're not done yet with just the attempts to germinate that seed. There's still more to do. Well, so what are you trying to do now? While we may not have generated plants from the seed, what was left in that seed is essentially

the blueprint for Bentley Rye, which is the genome, the DNA, right? Because those seeds were very much intact, the starchy part of the grain actually contains about 30% more DNA than the actual roots, the stems and leaves and those tissues, right? So there's, it's got extra, extra DNA in there, extra genome. We isolated DNA directly from those seeds. And we're going to move forward with sequencing end to end for all seven of those rye chromosomes, we're going to get a contiguous sequence of those A's T, Cs, and Gs. Those chromosomes that are present in the Bentley Rye are present in other Rye varieties, modern Rye varieties.

So modern Rye varieties contain segments of DNA that are identical or that we will find these segments that are identical to those chromosome segments in the Bentley Rye. And we'll essentially be able to reverse engineer the Bentley Rye genome from modern varieties just using modern plant breeding techniques. So we'll be able to hybridize different Rye varieties that have shared segments of their chromosomes and find those chromosomes that are bringing together essentially the complete genome then of the Bentley Rye variety. So, Chad, what is the goal here if you're able to resuscitate this rye? Our very large picture goal is to create a brand new variety of rye made specifically for the distilling industry. So modern plant breeding focuses almost entirely on maximizing yield in grain.

And that's great. That provides a lot of calories and a lot of fuel for the world. But it does it at the expense typically of the character of the grains that are being modified. In this situation, we're going to breed for two things. Better agronomic properties. So better root structure, better stem structure, higher yield in the field. But at the same time, we're going to breed for characteristics that make these better food products. For us, whiskey with more character, whiskey with more 4VG, which is one of the compounds that makes rice spicy when you make whiskey out of it.

And other things. And we're going to do them at the same time. So the interest the industry has in the Rose and Rye project that we started is we hope we'll continue on with a brand new variety of Rite created specifically for the industry that makes it more attractive to growers and more attractive to distillers, not just in Michigan, but in Kentucky and Tennessee where the vast majority of distilling in this country goes on. So effectively creating a brand new market for a very old grain and reintroducing a market economy that thrived in Michigan. 120 years ago and then disappeared. And so it sounds like different varieties of rye will affect how a whiskey tastes. Do you have any predictions for what Bentley rye whiskey might taste like? I don't think we do.

And it's got obvious historic value here. It provides us with access to genes that just don't exist in seed banks today. So it extends the genes that we can select from when we're making this whiskey. But we don't know with any certain. that the genes out of the Bentley rye will be the perfect grain for us for our purposes here, but almost certainly some portion of it will be. The first exciting thing we're going to do is see what Bentley rye looks like and tastes like when you grow it out at scale.

And from then, we're going to take the best portions of that and combine it with the best portions of the varieties that we already have in hand. We know rose and rye is a premium product that we can grow here in Michigan. So very likely that some elements, some genes from Rosen and genes from Bentley will be combined. But there are other varieties that Eric's feeling with that are proven ergonomically around the world. As climate change is happening, and it's certainly happening to us here in Michigan, rise in important crop because it, and its very nature is very sustainable, right? It's drought, drought tolerant. Soil conditions can vary widely and its sale can thrive.

and as things warm up, Michigan becomes a more and more exciting place to be growing rye. So we're going to select for characteristics that make it even more tolerant in the environment that we have to offer here in Michigan. And this is a long-term play to make Michigan a viable source of grain for the world. Well, I'll have to ask you to send me a bottle of that Bentley rye once it's up and running, but we have run out of time. This was such a wonderful conversation. Thank you both for joining me. Thank you so much. This is a thrill. Thank you, Kathleen. Thanks for having us. Dr. Eric Olson is a professor of wheat breeding and genetics at Michigan State University.

And Chad Munger is the founder and CEO of Mammoth Distilling in Bel Air, Michigan. That's it for this week's show. Lots of folks help make it happen, including Sandy Roberts, George Harper, Annie Niro, Jason Rosenberg. On Monday's episode, 50 Years of Science, with our famous early ancestor, Lucy. Catch you then. I'm SciFri producer, Rasha Aredi.