Science Friday - Top Science News Stories of 2023 | Solar Panels In Historic Cape Cod

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

The Top Science News Stories of 2023As the year comes to a close, we wanted to reflect on some of the top science stories of 2023: Scientific breakthroughs that will shape our lives in 2024 and beyond. Research that’s shifted how we understand the universe. And even a story or two that put a smile on our faces.In 2020, the story of the year was the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines. And while there are now updated versions of those, vaccine development has gone much further. This year we saw approval of two exciting new vaccines, for RSV and malaria.SciFri’s director and senior producer Charles Berquist talks with Sophie Bushwick, incoming senior news editor at New Scientist about this years vaccine breakthroughs and other top science news of the year, including a new generation of weight loss drugs, record high temperatures, completion of the human pangenome, an asteroid sample’s arrival on Earth, ripples in space-time, AI to understand pets’ emotions and T. rex’s new smile.Solar Panels In Historic Cape Cod: Who Decides Where ‘Modern’ Fits?Cape Cod is home to one of the largest historic districts in the country. In the 80 square miles that make up the Old Kings Highway Historic District, the goal of preservationists is to maintain a certain look. So from Sandwich to Orleans, some 45,000 people who live north of Route 6 are required to get approval from local historic committees for solar installations that are visible from a public way. Over the last few decades, many property owners who’ve had their solar plans challenged or denied have described the committees’ decisions as inconsistent, arbitrary, and subjective.But the committees remain steadfast: tourists and locals alike love seeing historic buildings preserved. And solar panels on the front of a house can read like billboards for modernity.“When you start messing with the street view of your house, we have a legal right, on behalf of the public, to make a judgment of the appropriateness of it,” said Jim Wilson, administrative counsel for the Old Kings Highway Regional Historic District Committee, which sets standards and hears appeals of rulings by town committees.The preservationists’ mandate is only to approve solar panels on homes when they present a minimal visual impact on the neighborhood. And that standard is often the source of the argument: what defines a minimum visual impact?Read the full story at sciencefriday.comTranscripts 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.

If you live in a historic community, should you be able to put solar panels on your front roof? For one town's historic committee, the answer may be yes, no problem, but then for another, the answer may be no. Which is where residents get really frustrated. It's Friday, December 22nd. There are no more shopping days before Science Friday. I'm Charles Berkwest. Coming up, we'll talk about the challenge of balancing historic preservation and atmosphere against the desire for modern amenities like solar panels. But first, you don't need me to tell you that a lot has happened this year.

And the field of science is no exception. From returning a sample of an asteroid to Earth to advances in all sorts of vaccines. Sophie Bushwick, incoming senior news editor and new scientist, join me to talk about the urine science. Let's start with this new malaria vaccine first. How big of a deal is this? This is a really exciting vaccine because malaria is a huge problem. It kills hundreds of thousands of people each year. And about 80% of the people who die from it are very young children.

So last year, the first malaria vaccine was developed, but it was kind of difficult to produce and expensive. This year, we saw the approval of a new malaria vaccine that's cheaper. It'll be easier to distribute a greater number of doses of this. And that's really exciting because malaria is a really serious disease, even if in the U.S., it's not as much on our radar. So now in the U.S., there were actually a couple of RS.V vaccines approved, including for young people. Tell me about those. That's right. So RSV is a pretty mild disease for healthy adults, but young children and the elderly can really suffer from it. So these new RSV vaccines, there's one that's supposed to be for the elderly population. They can take it and get inoculated before the winter illness season. And there's another one that's specifically designed. for pregnant women. And so the idea is they can have this injection and pass the immunity on

in utero before giving birth. So we can't get away without briefly mentioning there is a new COVID vaccine on the market too. That's right. There's this vaccine called Novavax. And unlike the mRNA vaccines that we're used to, this one is a little easier to produce. It's based on proteins. And it's also able to be stored in refrigerators. So because it doesn't need to be kept at such cold temperatures, it might be easier to store and distribute this one. So moving on to one of the other big medical stories of the year, there's been this rise of a new generation of weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wigovie, but it has not come without some controversy.

That's right. So these drugs were originally developed for people with diabetes, but they figured out pretty quickly that they also can trigger weight loss. And as a result, some trials have shown that they can reduce their. the risk of heart disease and other problems, and that they could even be a potential treatment for addiction. A lot of these drugs reduce hunger and cravings for food for folks who are trying to lose weight, but that it could also be having some effect on cravings for addictive substances. So clinical trials for that are still going on, but it's really interesting.

Yeah, that is super interesting. So now that we're approaching New Year's Day, folks might have forgotten about one of the year's literally hottest stories. This year has brought up some of the hottest days on record. That's right. July, this year was the hottest month in recorded history. But even throughout the year, there were a lot of months that broke heat records for that month. The most was September. That was the most anomalously hot month. The biggest difference between average September temperatures and temperatures in September 2023. Wow.

And this is a big issue because a lot of times when we think of climate change, we hear that, you know, they're trying to keep it to 1.5 degrees Celsius heat increase or below. And that doesn't sound very extreme. But just small increases in temperature like that can have huge effects. So we saw heat waves in Europe this year that caused a lot of deaths. We are seeing an increased likelihood of droughts of more severe hurricanes. I think that for a lot of folks who sort of hand waved that we wouldn't be seeing the effects of climate change for a very long time, we're already seeing those effects now. And I think this year, with record after broken record, really drove that home. Yeah, definitely. So there's been exciting human genome news this year. I understand that this year

marked the completion of the pan genome. But what is a pan genome? So previously, researchers had mapped the human genome. You know, they recorded all the details about the human DNA. But it was mostly the DNA of one individual and they filled in with other people. This new pan genome includes the genetic information for 47 different people. It's a more diverse group from regions all over the globe. And this is really important if we want to be able to compare how different genes are expressed in different populations, for instance. It's not perfect. There's groups that have said they still want to have more humans added to this database. And the more that we understand about knowing the genetic makeup of all these different people and how they compare to each other, the more we'll

learn about how DNA impacts things like fertility, heart health, even Alzheimer's disease and other problems that affect humans. So this is a better way of saying sort of what a baseline is for what is quote unquote normal and shared among many people versus looking at this one individual. Yes, that's right. And they were really, they were mapping, you know, each chromosome from telomere to telomere, you know, trying to get all the DNA that makes up that chromosome. And they also finally mapped out the Y chromosome, which previously had been missing. The Y chromosome had been kind of neglected before it was thought to be not that important. But by mapping it out, we're going to learn more about just what it does. So we can't go without hitting a couple of big

highlights in the world of space news. NASA's Osiris Rex was the first mission to bring back a sample from the asteroid Benu. And that was really kind of a nail butter. Yes, this was a very long-term, difficult mission. So not only has Benu really far away, about 200 million miles away from Earth, so it took this Osiris Rex flyer. It took about two years to get there. Then it had to map out the asteroid, figure out how to collect the sample, and then it had to come all the way back. Finally, it actually had to deliver this sample in this very well-protected case that could survive reentry through Earth's atmosphere. So researchers were super excited to get their hands on it, but they couldn't just unwrap the present right away because they don't want to contaminate it with all of our Earth atmosphere and germs. And so they had to open it very, very carefully. And now they'll finally be able to study this material that dates back really to the dawn of the solar system and could really teach us a lot about how it formed. Yeah. So unwrapping this present from the stars, what all are they hoping to learn from it?

So Benu is about 4.5 billion years old, and unlike Earth, which, you know, we were formed as part of the solar system, but we went through a lot of turmoil on the way, whereas Benu has been kind of floating in the vacuum of space, which preserved a lot of these volatile compounds and will give us a better idea of the snapshot of what types of chemicals were around in the early solar system. And then how that impacted the development of Earth and even life on Earth. Yeah, so we'll be looking forward to those results coming out later this year. And so zooming out for some big picture space news, this year astronomers also detected some gravitational waves. Remind us what those are and what they might help us understand. So gravitational waves are essentially ripples in the very fabric of space time. And they're very difficult to detect. You know, in 2015, researchers used a telescope to make the first measurements of gravitation. waves. But those gravitational waves came from black holes that were, I'm going to say, relatively

small. Researchers also want to study the gravitational waves coming from supermassive black holes, which could be 100 million times more massive than our sodden. The problem is these waves are so low frequency that their wavelengths are really dragged out. It would take like a decade for a single wave to pass through our solar system, which makes them really hard to measure with a standard telescope. So instead, researchers used the galaxy as a telescope. They looked at these objects called pulsars. These are these super dense, very quickly spinning stars that are releasing beams of electromagnetic radiation. And the idea is as the stars spin around, the beam spins around, like the beam of a lighthouse. And it creates this pulse that we can detect from Earth. And the

researchers were studying discrepancies, like these extremely, extremely tiny pauses in the pulse of all these different pulsars scattered around the galaxy, and they were able to detect this signal that came from these big, low-frequency gravitational waves disrupting the pulsars. Interesting. So this year, there's been headline after headline about AI, artificial intelligence. Personally, I'm almost getting sick of it. But you wanted to bring us an aspect of machine learning that some of us might have missed this That's right. I think it's very cool the way that AI and machine learning is making strides to sort of

translate between humans and the animal world. So there are a lot of the ways that animals communicate. We can't even detect as humans. You know, it might be higher frequency than we're used to picking up. It might involve pheromones or other signals that we don't have the senses to detect. But researchers have been able to develop these very small, unobtrusive sensors that can pick up a lot of these signals, and then they're able to use AI to translate between what those signals are and what the animals are doing and trying to communicate. So this has been used to do things like learn more about how bats communicate with each other or bees. But now researchers are also using AI to look at our pets. Most recently, I got to talk about a study where they looked

at cat faces and tried to use AI to learn whether that cat was in pain based on its facial expressions. Wow. So cat GPT. Exactly. So this last one is probably my pick for the single most important science story of the year. Paleontologists now believe that the Tyrannosaurus Rex had lips. I know. It's a big difference in the way we're used to picturing T. Rex. So previously, researchers who try to picture what these animals look like based only on their skeletons had compared T-Rex to the crocodilian-type animals. You know, you see a crocodile's teeth sticking out of its mouth, and they thought, oh, this must have been what T-Rex's mouth looked like as well. But now they think it looked maybe more like a Akamoto dragon's mouth, where lips covered those teeth. And so it would

have had a very different aspect than the version of T-Rex were used to imagining from media like Jurassic Park. Good to know. So if you need a last-minute stocking stuffer for that special T-Rex in your life. Fancy lip gloss might be the move. You know, T-Rex would love to have some chapstick. Absolutely. Exactly. That's all the time we have. I want to thank my guest, Sophie Bushwick, incoming senior news editor at New Scientist based in New York City. Sophie, it's always great to talk to you. Have a great holiday. You too. If you've ever been to a historic New England town, you know, old neighborhoods there tend to have a certain look. You'll see a lot of detached houses and frame construction, probably with wood siding or shingles, a lot of red brick chimneys.

And towns and historic districts are really protective of that look. Don't try to build a shiny modernist building on a historic small-town street. But what happens when the desire to keep that historic look rubs up against the desire for modern amenities like solar panels? Eve Zuckoff is an environment reporter for CAI in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Welcome back to Science Friday, Eve. Hi, thanks for having me. So you're out on Cape Cod, which has a historic district of some 80 square miles containing 45,000 or so residents.

What's the rule on solar panels there? The rule is that they need to create a, quote, minimal visual impact on a neighborhood, which is immediately where it gets complicated, because there are a half dozen towns that make up the whole historic district, and each town makes its own decisions. So a homeowner with their solar contractor might submit a proposal, go to a house. historic committee hearing and say, is it okay if my solar panels show just a little bit from the front of the house and the front of the street during the winter when the leaps are off the trees? For one town's historic committee, the answer may be yes, no problem, but then for another,

the answer may be no, which is where residents get really frustrated. Yeah, so what is the argument that's coming from these historic committees? How are they basing their refusals? Well, the arguments range from kind of economic to sentimental. The historic committees say it's important to understand history, and a great way to do that is to preserve the buildings that were once lived in by merchants and sea captains. And it's really good for our seasonal economy. I talked with Jim Wilson, who helps run the Old Kings Highway Regional Historic District Committee. And he said the Cape is full of tourists and second homeowners who come here to see our beaches, yes, but also spend their money in the quaint historic villages. When you start messing with the street view of your house, we have a legal right on behalf of the public to make a judgment of the appropriateness of it, whether or not it fits in will be harmonious in the neighborhood.

So that kind of brings up the second half of his argument. The historic committees only regulate the front of a home. If you want solar panels in the back of your roof or a trampoline park in your backyard, like go have at it. So it's not against solar as such, but the look of the solar. Exactly. The Historic District Committees review applications for any change in the exterior of buildings and structures as seen from the front. That includes fences and signs. They review applications for new construction or demolition.

And I will say the historic committee is another thing they kind of tout to defend themselves here, is that they did recently make changes to accommodate solar. Now, homeowners who want to install all black panels on. all black roofs on houses built less than 75 years ago, they don't have to plead their case to town historic committees anymore. Still, homeowners make the point that if the back of their roof isn't south facing or if they have a tree issue in the backyard, they really need their solar on the front. Yeah. And to sort of play devil's advocate here, these neighborhoods are not completely historically accurate either. Presumably you've got telephone poles and streetlights

and you've got modern cars parked out front and things like that. Right. And one step further, it's not like the whole historic district is all homes from the 17th century. Like you can drive through a movie set that way. No, no, no. There are homes in this massive district from the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. So homeowners feel like, why are we pretending my modern farmhouse is something it's not? Do you have a sense of how many people these rules are affecting,

how many people would want to do solar but can't? Well, again, there are 45,000 residents who live inside the district. And this is in the state of Massachusetts, where we have some of the highest electric bills in the country. So solar panels are cheaper in the long term for folks in this area. And they're also part of Massachusetts' overall goals. To reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reach net zero by 2050, Massachusetts wants to hit 40 percent renewable electricity. by 2030. We're currently getting about 10%. So a major expansion is needed there. And if it's going to be more difficult for people on Kupkod to get solar, there's an issue there. Yeah. So is there any kind of solution to this standoff? Well, there's this bill, right? And the overall goal of this bill making

its way through the state house is to establish solar within historic districts across the state as a public necessity, just like utility poles and wires and other systems that are all across historic districts. But during a recent committee hearing, this bill was seen as kind of too wide ranging that it could have a negative impact on much smaller historic districts. So it's somewhere back to the drawing board. The committee said, why don't you tweak the language a little bit and come find us later? Something to keep an eye on. Eve Zookoff is an environment reporter for CAI in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Thanks for being with me today.

Thanks so much. And that's it for today. On Monday, the complicated interplay in the brain between music, emotions, and memories. Happy holidays if you're celebrating. We'll see you soon.