Science Friday - Starliner Crewed Test Flight Rescheduled | Slugs And Snails Like Cities

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

The much-delayed crewed test flight is back on the calendar, despite a helium leak. Also, researchers used data from the crowd-sourcing nature observation app iNaturalist to rank animals’ tolerance of urban environments.Starliner Crewed Test Flight Rescheduled For This WeekendA long-delayed test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is back on the calendar for Saturday, June 1, carrying astronauts to the International Space Station. It’s a demonstration flight as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew program, intended to show that the new spacecraft design can be a practical and safe way to get people into space. If the flight is successful, NASA can then consider using the Boeing Starliner system for crewed flights to the ISS, joining the current fleet of craft from SpaceX and the Russian Soyuz program.The Starliner launch has been delayed numerous times. Its most recent launch attempt, on May 6, was scrubbed when systems flagged a bad valve in a rocket booster. That booster valve was replaced, but engineers then detected a small leak in the spacecraft’s helium thruster system, which led to still further delays. They have now determined that the flight can proceed even with the leaky system, allowing the upcoming launch attempt.Science Friday senior producer Charles Bergquist joins guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross to talk about the upcoming launch, and about other stories from the week in science, including the return of an active solar region responsible for recent fantastic aurora displays, research into how the brain decodes the meaning of “not,” and the announcement of two new giant pandas headed to the National Zoo.Which Animals Like Cities Most? Slugs And Snails Top The List.If you live in an urban environment, it might seem like the animals you see every day—birds, bugs, squirrels—have adapted perfectly fine to city life.But according to a new study in PLOS ONE, that isn’t always the case. Urbanization is directly linked to biodiversity loss, but researchers at UCLA, including Joey Curti and Dr. Morgan Tingley, wanted to find out specifically which animals thrive and which struggle in urban environments. So they turned to iNaturalist, a crowd-sourcing app where users upload photos of flora and fauna they see, along with information like location and date.The team combed through years of iNaturalist data in the Los Angeles metro area and developed an “urban tolerance score” for 511 animal species. This score, which incorporated data such as light and noise pollution from different sections of the city, was a factor tied to those species’ level of tolerance to the local environment.They found that snails and slugs love urban environments, likely thanks to increased moisture from local landscaping. But most other animals, including native species, and especially bugs like butterflies and moths, were not as tolerant to the region.Joey Curti, a PhD candidate in ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA and a co-author on that study, sits down with guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross to discuss the results of the study and what cities can learn from this kind of research to encourage healthy biodiversity.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.

How can logging the things you see around your neighborhood help researchers and city managers? I didn't really understand until having worked with these data sets, how valuable these crowdsourced data can be and how they can really advance science. It's Friday, May 31st, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm Cyfry producer Dee Peters Schmidt. If you're an animal living in a city, there's a good chance that factors like buildings, artificial light, and noise pollution are going to make your daily life kind of a pain. But a new study reveals exactly which animals thrive and which one struggle in urban environments, thanks to crowdsource data from an app called I Naturalist. And you might be surprised by some of the results.

We'll find out how researchers use this app to make recommendations to the city of Los Angeles. But first, here's guest host Ariel Duom Ross discussing the top news in science this week. The next few days are shaping up to be busy in space, with a long-delayed test flight carrying astronauts to the space station. Here to talk about that and other stories from the Week in Science is Charles Bergquist, SciFri's senior producer. Hey, Charles. Hey, Ariel. So tell me about this launch.

Why is it important? What's going on? So this is a test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft. It's a demonstration to show to NASA that their new spacecraft, part of a program NASA calls commercial crew, can be a practical and safe way to get people into orbit. This spacecraft has been delayed a lot. Most recently, it was supposed to launch on May 8. sixth, that launch was scrubbed due to a bad valve and a rocket booster. That booster valve was

replaced, but then they found another leak in the spacecraft's maneuvering system, which led to more delays. Okay, a leak doesn't sound good on a spacecraft. No, it doesn't, but it's not a leak as in, it's going to let all the air out of the crew capsule or a fuel leak that could lead to an explosion. This leak is coming from a helium system in the service module of the spacecraft. They sort of use squirts of helium gas and thrusters to do some maneuvering in orbit that doesn't involve firing a rocket. After the last launch was scrubbed, engineers looked at this leak and figured out that the flight should still be okay, even if the leak was a hundred times stronger. It would also mean taking the spacecraft back to the factory to fix the leak. So the new plan

is just to live with it and go ahead with this launch. Okay. So what is Boeing's plan now if they're going ahead with the launch? Yeah, so currently the plan is to launch midday on Saturday, around 1225 p.m. Eastern. This will be on an Atlas 5 rocket from the United Launch Alliance, and it'll carry two NASA astronauts, which Wilmore and Sunni Williams, to the International Space Station. And if the flight is successful, NASA can then consider using this Boeing Starliner system as a way to get into orbit, along with the craft from SpaceX and the Russian Soyuz craft that are the current ISS taxis. All right, hopefully that test flight will be successful, and there's other spaceflight news possible this weekend as well. Yeah, this one is exciting. A robotic lander sample return mission going to the far side of the moon.

This is the Chinese Changa Six mission, which was launched about four weeks ago. And the landing attempt is supposed to happen in early June. There have been other missions to the moon, and scientists have sampled moon rocks before. So why is this particular trip significant? So they're targeting a huge impact crater on the far side of the moon called the South Pole-Aitken Basin. This is the moon's oldest impact crater and also the largest. It's get this more than 2,500 kilometers wide, 8 kilometers deep. And the surface features on the far side of the moon are a lot different from what we see on the near side.

It's a lot rougher with less smoothing out from lava. So researchers hope that getting rock samples from that side of the moon could teach things about how the moon was formed and also about conditions in the solar system billions of years ago. So what's the timeline for this mission? It's something of an open question because the Chinese Space Agency doesn't tend to release a ton of information about their operations before they happen. Early plans called for a landing attempt June 2nd. The lander is supposed to gather about two kilograms of material. There will be a scoop thing, collecting dirt and rock samples that will be collected by a drill.

and then it'll lift off from the moon again about two days after landing. But we'll have to see. A lot of scientists around the world are really eager to see these samples. All right. Turning from the moon to the sun, there's sunspot news this week. Yeah. You may remember a couple weeks ago when people all over were able to see the aurora and there were all those amazing pictures online?

Oh, yeah, I remember. Yeah. So the group of sunspots that marks the very active region of the sun, responsible for the flares and coronal mass ejections that produce those northern lights has rotated back around the sun into view. And now that we can see it again, it looks like it's still active. Do we know if this means that we're going to have more chances to see the aurora? Yeah, it all depends just when and where the flares and coronal mass ejections take place. Earlier this month, there were 12 super powerful X-class solar flares across six days. And that's when we got the light show.

Now that this active region is back in view, it's already produced one X1 flare on May 29th. That could mean that there's some auroral activity here on Earth in the next few days, but probably not as far south as the last batch. But the region still has more time to act up again while it's in view, so people should keep an eye on the space weather forecast. All right. Well, that was really a treat last time. So, you know, we can't always be that lucky.

Definitely. Back here on Earth, there's news this week about a patient with a transplant. window implanted in his skull. What's going on there? Yeah, this is a report published this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine about work with one individual, Jared Hager. He sustained a traumatic brain injury from a skateboarding accident back in 2019 and had to have about half of his skull removed. At the height of the pandemic, there were delays in being able to make a prosthesis for him. So at that point, his brain was just covered by skin and connective tissue.

During that time, he took part in some research studies involving brain imaging. Fast forward, researchers have filled the hole in his skull with a transparent plastic window, basically plexiglass. And they're trying out an imaging technique called functional ultrasound imaging, which can't normally be done through a skull. But they found that it works through this clear window. And they were able to take images of his brain while he was awake and performing various tasks. It's really beautiful that so much of this story has to do with the collaboration between this patient and this research team and his willingness to try this out, right?

Yeah, they said that he has been extremely generous with his time and, you know, making use of what otherwise would be a very troubling situation. Right. Should we be expecting more brain windows like this in the future? So this is kind of a proof of concept, right, seeing if this ultrasound technique can work without the brain being essentially open. There's still work to be done here. They say that this ultrasound imaging technique that they're using apparently has some advantages over things like fMRI in terms of resolution. Some other imaging techniques might require you to implant electrodes into the brain, and this doesn't. So that's another plus. But beyond the imaging stuff, the scientists here say that there are some advantages,

just to being able to see, like with your eyes into the skull like this. Some people with brain injuries can develop clots under their prostheses. And with this transparent window, you can keep an eye on things. Huh. Well, that's pretty clever. I like that. In other brain news, researchers are now studying how the human brain processes words like not. Yeah.

This is a little weird. So if you ask me how things are going and I say, not bad. What do I mean by that? Well, I think typically you'd say good, right? Yeah, so this is work published this week in the journal Ploss Biology. And researchers were looking at what's going on in the brain when it interprets that kind of negation, the nodding of something. And they did a few different things. First, they asked people to rank on a scale of sort of very bad to very, very good, where a negated phrase like, not bad, might fall on that scale.

And then they also used imaging techniques to watch what's going on in the brain when a person hears something like not happy. First, it apparently takes more processing time for the brain to deal with this than when you hear someone say sad. But they also, this is cool. They found that when you hear a phrase like not happy, first they see the area in the brain that would respond to happy gets activated. And then it sort of gets muted a bit. So the word not is sort of attenuating the word that comes after instead of simply inverting its meaning. So it's not an antonym. It's not, you know, a one-for-one relationship.

Not bad does not equal good. There's a, there's more nuance there. Right. If your coffee is not hot, it's not necessarily cold. Right. That makes sense to me. That seems, yeah, that seems right. But it's fascinating that they were able to look at this through, you know, these techniques.

Yeah. different approaches to learning more about what's going on in the brain. You know, it's one of these interesting linguistics things, like, why do we speak the way we do, how do we interpret the world, convey that to others. But they point out that this idea of negation shows up a lot in technical and legal documents, right? You've got phrases like, something is not unlike, something else. And they also say that this concept of what negation really means is an area that the computers

and AI have trouble dealing with. Hmm. Interesting. Okay. So we can learn about a lot of things by looking at this. It's not unuseful. Okay. You have one more strange brain trick story about extra digits, I hear. Yeah, we first told you about this story three years ago. Researchers who had given people an extra prosthetic thumb on one of their hands. It'd be sort of attached your palm below the little finger sort of opposite your real thumb. and you activated it using a pressure sensor under your big toe.

In 2022, they took this device to a science festival in the UK and had almost 600 different regular people, just fairgoers, from kids to senior citizens, try out using this bonus prosthetic thumb. And in the journal Science Robotics this week, they say that 98% of the users were able to successfully manipulate objects using that extra thumb during the first minute of use, which is impressive, right? Yeah.

Not everyone was able to do it equally well. They had a bunch of different tasks for users to try out. Some did better than others. Very young participants tended to have the most problems. But in general, it seems your brain is surprisingly able to make this extra thumb part of its map of the world. That's incredible. Is this the kind of technology that people might be able to buy and wear in the future? Or was this more of an art project? So this started as a design project, but they say that people did actually find it pretty useful. But this research is more about seeing how easy it is for people's brains to adapt to all sorts of assistive technologies or prosthetics, not just replacing something that was lost, but maybe adding new capabilities. Like, what if you gave someone an extra arm or a prehensile tail? I just kind of get lost in that kind of news. I'm deeply, deeply interested in seeing where this goes. Finally, some important cute animal news. It looks like the National Zoo will be getting some new pandas.

Yes, this is big cute animal news for panda fans. You might recall that the much-loved pandas left the Smithsonian's National Zoo last November. But it was announced this week that by the end of the year, there should be a new pair of giant pandas in residence, again, on loan from China. They're both two years old, which is supposedly like early adolescence in panda years. So they're very playful, exploratory, clumsy. They are a male named Bao Li, meaning treasure and energetic. And a female, Qing Bao, which means green and treasure. Once they arrive, they'll be in quarantine for about 30 days,

and then they'll have a few weeks to settle in before zoo visitors can actually see them. So don't book your tickets to Washington just yet. Fantastic news. Charles Berkwrest, Science Friday's senior producer. If you live in a city, you might assume, that the animals you see every day, like birds, bugs, or squirrels, have adapted perfectly fine to living in an urban environment. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. Urbanization is directly linked to biodiversity loss. But researchers at UCLA wanted to find out specifically

which animals thrive and struggle in an urban environment. So they turned to a large source of readily available data. I naturalist. The app where people log the plants and animals, they see, along with their location and the date. And the scientists use this information to determine which animals were the most tolerant of urban environments over a period of time. And you might be surprised by some of the results. Here to tell us about them, as well as what city managers can learn from the data to increase biodiversity in urban environments, is Joey Curti, PhD candidate in ecology

and evolutionary biology at UCLA. They were a co-author on that study, published in Plus One. Joey, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thank you for having me. Thank you so much for being here. So if I'm an animal living in a city, what kinds of factors are going to be stacked against me in terms of my ability to survive and thrive? Yeah, that's a great question. It's going to depend a lot about your natural history.

So you can imagine if you're a flighted animal, say a bird, there's going to be a lot of things that you can encounter on the landscape. For example, buildings that have reflective surfaces that might pose a challenge to you as you're sort of navigating across the landscape. Similarly, you can imagine if you're a nocturnal flighted animals, say a bat. So you use echolocation to find prey and maybe road noises are really impactful to your ability to do so. Similarly, the way that we light cities is really impactful for a lot of animals. And this can impact your ability to find your home, your ability to find prey, for example. So there are a lot of factors in an urban landscape that can be really challenging for our

animal species here. And, you know, if you don't mind me asking, why is it important for a city to have healthy biodiversity. Yeah, so I'm a conservation biologist and I'm absolutely in the camp of biodiversity having an intrinsic value and I think that it enriches my life every day to go outside into my yard and to see all the native animals flourishing. But I also know that a lot of people, it's a more convincing argument to say biodiversity protects your health. And so there are a lot of studies out there, especially with birds, that show that your exposure to animal-generated noises, for example, bird song really do a lot to reduce your stress levels and your levels of anxiety and depression.

And so biodiversity inherently can have a major impact on our sort of human health and our health span as individuals. I want to ask you, though, I hear that you're a big fan of the app, I Naturalist. How did you use it in this study? Yeah. So you can't go out and measure and monitor every different species as a group of scientists unless you want to spend a lifetime doing so. And so we were excited to be able to leverage this amazing crowdsource data set that tons of people use across the city on their daily lives. So it's an incredibly vast data set. So it's about 189 million observations. So it's a ton of data to work with. And so we downloaded observations from across Los Angeles as well as 150 kilometers surrounding the city. And that left us with

well over a million observations to work with across a bunch of different taxonomic groupings that we thought were important to monitor, including mammals, birds, amphibians. reptiles, and several different groups of invertebrates. And after pretty strict filtering, we were left with 511 different native species that we felt we had good data in order to move forward with our analyses. We were really interested in understanding how these species on an individual level relate to measures of urban intensity. And for that, we mean things like light pollution, so artificial light at night,

sound pollution, and measures of impervious surfaces. So our concrete or asphalt, things like that. So what did you find? What animals did better than expected? Which ones did worse? And how did you come to those conclusions? Yeah, absolutely. So species can take on a negative value, meaning they have an intolerance to our measure of urban intensity or a positive value, which means they're positively associated with urban intensity. And we found that on average, species had a negative association with urban intensity, meaning that they're more likely to be seen and observed in wild spaces across the city. So you can think near Santa Monica Mountains. or your Griffith Park, for example. We also found, though, that some birds, for example, did have positive associations with urban intensity. Most had negative interactions. And then on average, the one group that did well seemed to be snails and slugs.

Was that something you expected to see? I mean, I would say that all of this was pretty surprising to me. I'm not a malacologist, but when we sort of dig into the literature a bit, potentially ornamental landscaping, for example, lawns, different plants that we plant in our yards, might have an impact on our native snails and slugs. Snails and slugs need moisture to survive. And so if we introduce a lot of moisture to irrigate our non-native plants that we introduce into our lawns, potentially that's actually creating good habitat if you're a snail or a slug.

Okay. So what about the animals that did worse, right? The ones that were the least tolerant of urban environments? Yeah. So animals that tended to have negative relationships with urbanization tend to be our habitat specialist animals. So, for example, California quail, and these birds really rely on shrub cover. And of course, you know, we don't see those in downtown Los Angeles because that habitat no longer

exists. So, you know, things like acorn woodpeckers or rent-hit species, these are all birds. They tend to just really stick to these core habitat fragments that still exist within city. So for example, Griffith Park. So there's a component of human behavior in this study as well, right? You were dependent on people logging sightings of various animals. And I would imagine that that could.

could introduce certain biases, maybe in the types of animals logged or in the times of day when people log them. How did you control for that? Yeah, that's a fabulous question. You know, we're really lucky to be working directly with Morgan Tingley and his lab, which do a lot to work with these big data sets and be able to control for these different sort of confounding variables. And proximity to roads and trail networks is a major source of bias for these data sources. Similarly, different areas of the city have different amounts of effort, for example. But essentially, if you're in a grid cell in Los Angeles and any bird is observed, for example, we take that as indication that that grid cell has had survey effort, and therefore, if we're looking for,

for example, a rent-it in that area and we don't see it, but we see some birds have been observed, we take that as a sign that at least some effort has been taken to try to find birds in that area. So it's probably a true absence of that individual species. Not to be too pessimistic here, but is it even possible for a huge urban landscape like L.A. to have healthy urban biodiversity. You know, I think I have to be optimistic as a conservation biologist. There are a lot of initiatives here within the city to try to address this no net loss of biodiversity by 2050 goal that we have. We actually have a wildlife ordinance that's going through city council right now to make sure that the sort of footprint of the new development is sort of biophilic in nature and is not hindering our native species from moving

across the landscape, for example. And so I'm really optimistic for our city to really do absolutely everything that it can to try to improve and maintain our biodiversity. Did this research make you look at Los Angeles any differently? You know, I've always been a big proponent of a naturalist. I can actually be kind of an insufferable hiking partner here in Los Angeles, stopping every five seconds to take pictures of beetles or bees or, you know, your Western Fence lizard. But I think really, I didn't really understand until having worked with these data sets, how valuable these crowdsourced data can be and how they can really advance science. And so now that I've worked with these data, I'm even more insufferable when I go outside.

I document everything that I possibly can because I know that this is really feeding directly into tools that the city is using to evaluate its nature. All right. Thanks for taking the time to explain all of this, Joey. I really appreciate it. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Joey Curti is a PhD candidate in ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA. That's all the time we have for today. Lots of folks help make the show happen, including Annie Nero, Emma Gomez, Danielle Johnson. Next time we'll get an update on how some states are making it easier for consumers to fix their own devices.

I'm SciFry producer Deep Petersmith. See you then.