Science Friday - The Science That Captivated SciFri’s Reporters In 2024

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

Today, we’re taking time to reflect on all that 2024 brought us in the world of science, from the total solar eclipse in April to the demise of the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars and the rise of the blockbuster GLP-1 weight-loss medications. SciFri producers Kathleen Davis and Charles Bergquist join Ira to wrap up the year in science, in a conversation recorded in a live event at WNYC’s Greene Space.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.

From Mars to Manhattan, we've been covering the biggest science stories of the year. It's a job that requires a lot of research and also some tricky pronunciations. This PFSAS stands for perfloro and polyfluoral alcohol substances. Very good. It's Monday, December 30th, and this is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski, and as this year closes down, we're looking back at what was a very busy year in science news. Recently, Ira Flato sat down with two of our shows, at WNYC Radio's Green Space.

It was in front of a live crowd. Let's take a listen. Let me welcome them. Charles Berkwist, Science Friday's director, senior producer, and our unofficial radio story archivist. Welcome, Charles. Hey, Ira. Kathleen Davis, who is our audio producer, State of Science Champion,

and Philin host, when I'm not there, she does a great job. Kathleen, welcome. Good to have you. Thanks for having me. All right, so I'll just start going down the row this way with you, Kathleen. Let's start with that story that many of our listeners may have experienced themselves. This April's total solar eclipse. Yes, April 8th was a big day.

For a lot of us, North America was really lucky. We experienced this total solar eclipse. So just a little science reminder, this is when the moon passes between the sun and the earth, and it can block out some of the light. It's also such a great communal event. I love eclipses because you get the little glasses and everyone is just standing in the street or in a field just looking up. I spent that in a parking lot out of CVS and it wasn't working. No matter where you are, they're a blast.

So more than 30 million people in North America were in the path of totality. And so that included places like Buffalo and Indianapolis and also down in Texas, a few cities. Even if you weren't in the path of totality, like here in New York, New York City, we had, I think about 89% coverage, but it's still an amazing event. And so if you did miss this one, you're in luck because the next total solar eclipse is in August of 2026. And you have time to plan your trip because apparently the best places to see this will be in Greenland, Iceland, and Spain. So if you ask me, that sounds like the best time to plan a vacation. I know one out of the three places I will likely go to.

Charles, but we did get some less than Stella News from NASA about the ingenuity Mars helicopter. Tell us what that was. Yeah, that's right, Ira. I mean, you may recall the nickname was Ginny, but I always thought of this little helicopter is just like this scrappy little guy somehow. And it's really a kind of a reminder of why you shouldn't personify your space robots. Because I felt like, you know, I was really sad when it ended, right? Just to remind people, this is a little. little helicopter that went to Mars, strapped to the bottom of the Perseverance rover, landed in 2021. And it was really small. It was like four-foot rotor span, I guess you'd say, and weighed about four pounds. And the original idea of this was just to be like a demonstration, right? They weren't actually trying to get science out of this. They said, we're going to fly it maybe five times for

the course of a month. See, if we can answer the important question, can you fly a helicopter on Mars? the atmosphere is so much thinner than it is here. They really didn't know if it would work. Turns out it did work. And they managed to fly it about 72 times over the course of about three years. Wow. Yeah. So, you know, once they figured out that this was working, they said, you know, we can actually use the helicopter to scout out places for the rovers to go. Right. You know, see where in Jezero crater we might want to go next. And they also sort of started testing its limits, right? What if we know that it can fly, can it do this? Can I do this other thing? But then in January of 2024, it had a hard landing during one of its missions, broke a rotor, and that pretty much

ended the mission. I hate when that happens. But as most things that NASA has sent to Mars, it really outlived its original estimate, right? Yeah, I mean, you're trying for five flights, you get 72? That's not bad. I'll take that all the time. Charles, back here on Earth, there's been more news and crises related to our drinking water. The EPA finalized the first ever national limits on acceptable PFAS levels in drinking water. And people are still experiencing issues with access to clean water around the country, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think this year really has been one of both increasing awareness of these chemicals, but also increased efforts to try and do something about them. And PFAS is what? Yeah, so the,

This PFAS stands for perfloro and polyfluoral alcohol substances. Very good. Which basically means you've got a long chain of carbons with a lot of carbon-fluoring bonds along it. And those carbon-fluoring bonds are super strong. They're hard to break. That's part of what made these substances so useful for things like flame retardants and stain repellents. They were used in tons of things for years. but because those bonds are so hard to break,

it also means that once those chemicals are made, they stay around in the environment for a long, long time. So now they're in the earth, they're in the water, they're in breast milk, they're in the blood samples of pretty much everybody in this room. And they have been linked to health problems. Right. So as you mentioned in April, the EPA said,

we are finally going to put hard limits on six of these chemicals. that cannot be higher than a certain level in your drinking water. They also said that they're going to give a billion dollars to municipalities to help water treatment plants either filter or try and test for these chemicals. Yeah, that's good news, at least. It is good news. There's a lot to be done still. A couple of weeks ago, we reported on some researchers who had come up with a new light-activated

catalyst that actually can try and break that carbon fluorine bond that I talked about. It's not ready for prime time yet, but these efforts to try and clean up the PFS instead of just filtering it out are definitely a good sign. Charles, you've got an A in chemistry, I'm sure. I did. In college, Catherine, let's talk a little about the advances in health care and medicine. The first CRISPR-based therapy was approved by the FDA in the past year. Is that important? What's so important about?

It's hugely important. I mean, CRISPR is one of the most, I think, amazing medical technologies that we have right now. It is the ability to pinpoint certain genes and modify them while they're still in the body. So at the very tail end of last year, the first CRISPR-based therapies were approved by the FDA. This was a huge step in these therapies. So these were two different therapies that were both for sickle cell disease. So as I think a lot of people know, sickle cell disease is this condition where red blood cells are malformed. It can be incredibly debilitating.

It affects about 100,000 Americans in the U.S., most of African descent. And again, it is a very debilitating condition. And as I said, there were two gene therapies that both do pretty much the same thing. And they are one-time treatments, which is pretty incredible. The downside is that they're incredibly expensive. They are $2 to $3 million per treatment, which is obviously way outside of the budgets of many people. But this approval is the first step to get more of these CRISPR-based therapies approved for a general public. And I think that's a huge step.

Yeah, that's good to hear. Let's stay on the health beat a little bit longer because I know that another story that you've been following is access to abortions. care has been a really big story again this year. Remind us how access has changed across the country in in 2024. Right. It's hard to talk about medical news without talking about about abortion. So as I think we all know in 2022 Roe versus Wade was struck down that eliminated the federal constitutional standard for abortion in the U.S. So this became a state's issue. And in many places, it became kind of the wild west in terms of care. And so, So there's been a lot of fallout in the last two years. ObGYNs that we've had on Science Friday

have said that they're moving out of states where abortion has been extremely limited or completely made illegal. One statistic that I always think about is earlier this year we had a physician on from Idaho where there was a report that said in the last two years, almost a quarter of all OBGYNs had left the state. That was amazing. I remember that. They said they just couldn't ethically do their jobs. And I do think it's important when we talk about this issue that across the board, even, you know, across all political ideologies, support for abortion is actually pretty high. It stands at about 63%. Yeah. Yeah. We asked our listeners for some of their most memorable science news stories from the last year. Here's what L.A. from South Carolina sent this. For me, the biggest science

breakthrough this year has to be the approval of weight loss injections by Medicare. I know these things have been around for a while, but when the purse strings opened, my life changed. After six months, my health has shown considerable improvement, especially in those systems affected by diabetes. I was demoted to pre-diabetic from hardcore, and at the age of 71, see more possibilities than I did at 61. Yeah, I think this has been one of the biggest science and health stories for a lot of people, because it's so personal. These drugs that this listener was talking about include things like OZembek, Wagovi, they're called GLP-1 agonist medications, and basically what they do is they trigger the release of insulin from the pancreas, and this suppresses the appetite,

it increases feelings of fullness, it slows digestion. These drugs are meant to treat conditions like type 2 diabetes, but they're also prescribed in some cases for weight loss. And many people report that these have been incredibly successful for them personally. Yeah. I bet you there are people in our audience who take it or know somebody who has been taking these drugs. Yeah. So it's so widespread. Charles, let's move on to some exciting news from the fossil world.

We always cover fossil stuff. We do. Yeah, I mean, people love fossils, right? But this is a fun one. Researchers exploring the Richards Spur-Limstone Cave System. This is a paleontological hotbed in Oklahoma. found fossilized reptile skin. And what's cool here is it's estimated at 288 million years old,

which is 130 million years older than the previous old skin record holder. Wow. That's a dubious, nice distinction, yeah. You've got to strive for something, right? So they think that because of this, the way the cave system is set up, it's got this really dry environment, it's got these clay sediments, and it's got this oil that sort of seeps through the sediments

from even older critters that have broken down, and they think that that's what preserved this sample. They're not big, they're like fingernail size. The size of the fossils. The skin samples, yeah. Yeah. So they're like fingernail-sized, but they say that they can see,

it's sort of crocodile-like. You've got these sort of disconnected scales that don't overlap, but they say that looking between the scales, they can see these sort of hinge-like structures that are like what you would see in a modern snake or a legless lizard. And the reason that this is sort of significant is that 288 million years ago, this is like these are some of the first critters to live most of their lives under our land. Right.

So you're sort of opening up the whole history of skin formation. And it's always really fascinating when you could actually have a sample of skin versus just the hard bones. bone. Right, yeah. They've got both sort of the fossilized skin and also impressions of the skin in other things that give them information about what these critters might actually have looked like. Yeah, one of our favorite subjects on Science Friday, every time we can talk about it. And Kathleen, I remember one of your favorite stories to report from this year was about an animal closer to home than ancient lizards. Ants. What could be so exciting about ants? Well, I'll tell you. Please.

A little bit of context. Back in 2011, scientists were doing a survey of ants in Manhattan, as you do if you are an ant scientist, I suppose. Sometimes you have no choice in the matter of it. Not a bad place to do ant research, I guess. And these entomologists found something really interesting. They found a new type of ant that they hadn't seen before in Manhattan. And this was an ant that was fairly large. And side note, the way that these entomologists do this research is,

It's just the best. So they basically use a giant straw. They stick it into a flower bed in Times Square, for example. I know that flower bed. They suck up the ants, and they go, not in the mouth, into a container. And then they can do their ant survey. So not my job, but it's somebody's job. So fast forward to this year in 2024, this aunt has dramatically established itself in Manhattan's,

Specifically, I'm not joking, off of Broadway. No comment necessary. It's been identified now as Lasius emerginatus, which is actually native to Europe. So the big question now is, okay, how did these little ants not only get to New York, but really establish themselves? If you've been to Broadway, you know the answer to that. Well, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, is what they say. And so it's too early to know how this is going to affect the ant ecosystem in New York City, but obviously scientists are keeping an eye out for it.

How do they survive? I mean, you know, we remember seeing those pictures of the rat carrying the piece of pizza. What are they, what are the ants? I think urban animals are just very, just very scrappy. And I think those flower beds are pretty warm. But I have to say, the scientists want the public to help in identifying sightings of this ant, especially if you find it outside the city. I-naturalist has a specific page where you can do this and I have to say it's not called the Manhattan Project. It's called the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan. You out dad joked me today. And what does it look like again? It is a fairly large ant. It is dark brown with a reddish midsection. So you might need your

special glasses for that one. Yeah, get your glasses to get out your mouth. Yeah, I love looking for that. Coming up after the break, one of our biggest science stories is about one of the smallest critters. Stick around for that. Hey there, folks, Ira here. I'm counting down the minutes of what has been another long year and reminding you that this is your last chance to make a tax deductible donation for 2024. We still have that dollar-for-dollar donation matching effect. So take advantage and make your gift now. Don't wait, Science Friday is depending on you. Go to sciencefriiday.com slash support. each one of you can make a difference in our work.

From everyone to Science Friday, wishing you a happy and science-filled new year, and thanks. Charles, let's close out with our final story for these Sears Roundup, and it's an exciting one, and I'm talking about scientists announced this October that they completed the mapping of the entire brain of a fruit fly. Yes, I mean, you got a lot of news. This is very important.

This is work looking at something called, connectome, which is basically mapping out the connections between everything in the brain. It's sort of like a wiring diagram for the brain, right? And you say, okay, fruit fly, how complicated can that be? But this is, they ended up mapping the connections between 140,000 different neurons in this teeny little brain, which, you know, connecting back and forth, that works out to like 50 million different linkages. Wow. So, you know, this is. is a huge project. To do this, they took 21 million scanning electron microscope images of fruit fly brains. They gave them to an AI that sort of puzzle pieced them together. But then they

combined that data with volunteers who sort of traced the connections, the individual connections. One at a time. Yeah. I mean, this is like years worth of person power going into this. And this is sort of key to being able to start to link together which neuron does which behavior. We're going to start with the fruit fly, eventually moved to larger animals. But, I mean, to your point, this was in 140,000 neurons. Estimates of human brains is 86 billion neurons. So they've got a ways to go. You got a ways to go.

I want to thank you both for filling us. and on some great science stories for 2024. Thank you very much. Charles Berkowitz, director and senior producer at Science Friday, Kathleen Davis producer and fill-in host at Science Friday. That's all the time we have. Coming up tomorrow, we're resharing a conversation we had with science legend Dr. Jane Goodall more than 20 years ago. Lots of folks helped to make the show happen, including

Diana Plasker. Beth Rami. Danielle Johnson. Rasha Ridi. I'm John Dankoski. We'll see you tomorrow.