Science Friday - Ukraine And The Energy Market, More West Nile Virus, Bird Flu In Chickens, 5,000 Exoplanets Found. March 25, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

How Has The War In Ukraine Shaped The Global Energy Market? Russia’s war on Ukraine sent shock waves through the global energy market. The United States and the United Kingdom stopped importing Russian oil and gas, and the European Union set a target of reducing their reliance on Russian fossil fuels by two thirds. In the short term some countries may start relying more on dirty fossil fuels like coal to cushion the economic impact of the shifting energy market. However, some experts believe the current political situation may inspire a lasting transition to clean energy. Guest host John Dankosky talks with Tim Revell, United States Deputy Editor at New Scientist about the changes to the global energy market and other top science news of the week, including the latest on the BA2 covid-19 variant, Orangutan slang, the winner of the prestigious Abel prize in mathematics, lettuce genetically modified to prevent bone loss, and robots who learned to peel bananas without crushing them.     Why Climate Change May Bring More West Nile Virus To The U.S. Michael Keasling of Lakewood, Colorado, was an electrician who loved big trucks, fast cars, and Harley-Davidsons. He’d struggled with diabetes since he was a teenager, needing a kidney transplant from his sister to stay alive. He was already quite sick in August when he contracted West Nile virus after being bitten by an infected mosquito. Keasling spent three months in hospitals and rehab, then died on Nov. 11 at age 57 from complications of West Nile virus and diabetes, according to his mother, Karen Freeman. She said she misses him terribly."I don't think I can bear this," Freeman said shortly after he died. Spring rain, summer drought, and heat created ideal conditions for mosquitoes to spread the West Nile virus through Colorado last year, experts said. West Nile killed 11 people and caused 101 cases of neuroinvasive infections—those linked to serious illnesses such as meningitis or encephalitis—in Colorado in 2021, the highest numbers in 18 years. The rise in cases may be a sign of what’s to come: As climate change brings more drought and pushes temperatures toward what is termed the “Goldilocks zone” for mosquitoes—not too hot, not too cold—scientists expect West Nile transmission to increase across the country. Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.   Millions Of Iowa Chickens Infected With Deadly Strain Of Bird Flu Iowa and federal agriculture officials have confirmed a deadly strain of bird flu in a large commercial flock of egg-laying hens in northwest Iowa’s Buena Vista County. It’s the fourth case of bird flu in the state and the largest flock to date to be infected by this year’s outbreak. Chloe Carson, a spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, said Friday that initial reports indicate there are approximately 5.3 million birds in the flock. Carson said the department won’t have exact numbers for a few days. The numbers will be released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture once all the birds have been destroyed to prevent the disease from spreading. It’s the second confirmed case of bird flu in Buena Vista County this year. The virus was confirmed in a commercial flock of nearly 50,000 turkeys in the county on March 6. The deadly strain was also confirmed in a flock of more than 915,000 commercial egg-laying hens in southwest Iowa’s Taylor County on March 10 and a backyard flock of nearly 50 chickens and ducks in Pottawattamie County on March 1. Agriculture officials have cautioned producers and backyard flock owners to keep their birds away from wild birds that are migrating. They can carry the virus in their saliva or feces and show no signs of infection. Bird flu has been found in commercial and backyard flocks in 17 states, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Iowa has about 56 million egg-laying chickens and is the top egg-producing state in the country. In the 2014-2015 bird flu outbreak, Iowa and Minnesota were hit the hardest. More than 50 million birds were killed in that outbreak, including nearly 33 million in Iowa.   5,000 Total Exoplanets Have Now Been Discovered This week, the NASA Exoplanet Archive logged the 5,000th confirmed planet outside of our solar system. This marks a huge advance since the first exoplanet discovery in 1992, when astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail announced the discovery of two planets orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12. Now, the Archive contains confirmed sightings of planets in a wide range of shapes and sizes—from "hot Jupiters" to "super Earths"—but they still haven’t found any solar systems just like our own. In many cases, all astronomers know about these distant planets is their size and how far away from their stars they orbit. The TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission currently in orbit may eventually add 10,000 more candidates to the lists of possible planets. The Nancy Grace Roman Space telescope and ESA’s ARIEL mission, both planned for launch later this decade, could add thousands more. And the James Webb Space Telescope, currently undergoing commissioning, will attempt to characterize the atmospheres of some of the planets astronomers have already discovered. Astronomer Jessie Christiansen, the NASA Exoplanet Archive Project science lead, joins John Dankosky to talk about what we know about planets around distant suns, and how researchers are working to learn more about these far-off worlds. 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 John Dankoski in for Ira Flato this week. Later this hour, an exoplanet milestone. Plus, we'll talk about how climate change could make West Nile virus more common in the U.S. But first, Russia's war on Ukraine has sent shockwaves through the global energy markets. The U.S. and U.K. have stopped importing Russian oil and gas. The EU has set a target of reducing their reliance on Russian fossil fuels by two-thirds. And just today, President Joe Biden was in Brussels, announcing a new plan with European leaders to increase shipments of liquefied natural gas to Europe to help in that effort. But can this political situation spark a more rapid clean energy transition? Joining me now to talk about this and other top

science news of the week is Tim Revell. He's United States Deputy Editor at New Scientist. He's based in New York City. Tim, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me. So let's start off with the current situation. How has this war in Ukraine changed the global energy supply? Yeah, so Russia is a big exporter of fossil fuels, oil and natural gas. It's number three in the world in terms of exports. And what has changed is that the invasion of Ukraine has made that politically untenable for a lot of countries. They no longer want to take Russian oil and natural gas. And so in the short term, what you're seeing is countries immediately announcing plans, like you said, about how they're going to stop using oil and natural

gas. And my colleague at new scientist, Adam Vaughn, he's been investigating this week about what the potential knock-on effects of these decisions will be. And so in the short term, you know, you can't just build solar panels, wind farms, and nuclear power plants overnight. And so we're sort of seeing two main things happening. And one of them is that some countries are looking to replace Russian oil and gas with coal, which is, you know, really bad because coal is much more polluting. And if you remember in November, 200 countries signed the COP26 agreement that was to try and phase down the use of coal across the world. So that's not great. And then the second thing that's happening is that some countries are looking to import more liquid natural gas. But this is cleaner than coal,

but it's also having some unintended consequences. And the main one being that it's causing the price to go up. And so that means that countries that currently rely on liquid natural gas, and this is the case in a lot of places in Asia that are trying to phase out coal. the price goes up. Ultimately, that means they'll have to fall back on coal again. So, of course, short term, this is bad for the environment. Long term, you mentioned the COP 26th Summit. Have we been hearing from leaders in Europe and elsewhere that they are committed to all of these plans that they put in place despite the fact that the energy markets have changed so much in just the last few months? Yeah, we've had some indications that those plans are still in place. We've had Antonio Gutierrez, the UN, General Secretary, he made a bit of an intervention this week saying it's all very well having

these ambitions to move away from Russian oil and gas, but it can't be at the detriment to our climate change ambitions. We're still waiting on quite a lot of the full detailed plans from countries about how they're going to meet COP26 ambitions. And my hope is that longer term, these two goals are really aligned. The idea of having a more secure energy source for your country or the countries that you are allied with and having more green and renewable energy. So hopefully we will see eventually that a lot of that investment that will go into securing up energy supplies will be directed towards cleaner and greener forms of energy. Some other news this week from the invasion of Ukraine.

This week, Russia also attacked a chemical plant there. Now, we've been watching what's happening with nuclear sites in the country, but this is something new. I mean, what could this mean, Tim, for the nature of attacks we might see them pursue in the future? Yeah, it's pretty worrying this. And Joe Biden this week said that there are clear signs that Russia is considering the use of biological and chemical weapons. And one of the signs he pointed to is that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been falsely accusing Ukraine of doing essentially planning the same thing, even though there's no evidence of that whatsoever. And this attack on a chemical plant in Ukraine perhaps shows that even if we don't actually see chemical weapons being dropped by the Russian military, we might see chemical plants attacked, and that can have a similar sort of effect. So this one that was attacked was an ammonia plant in Sumer Ukraine, and ammonia gas, it's highly irritant and corrosive. And so once it was released into the area, a five-kilometer

radius had to be set up and people had to stay indoors there. So it didn't cause a lot of harm beyond forcing people to stay inside, but had a similar sort of effect that you might have with chemical weapons. We have to move to the other troubling global news story of the week, and it's COVID-19 and this BA2 sub-variant. This week, the WHO released a report about the virus's spread in Europe. What do they find, Tim? Yeah, so the World Health Organization put out a report this week saying that part of the reason we're seeing increases is down to BA2, but part of it is also down to the way that coronavirus restrictions have been lifted in, and they particularly looked at 18 European countries, including France, Germany, the UK, and Italy.

And they say the problem is they've lifted restrictions too suddenly. So in England, where I was around a month ago, we went from having various mask mandates, working from home, to pretty much all legal restrictions being lifted. And now cases are really on the rise in many of these countries, including in England. Does this tell us anything about what is likely to happen in the U.S.? I mean, we've looked to Europe before in terms of what's coming next? It's often been the case that in the US, a similar trajectory has been followed than what's happening in the UK, but a few weeks or a few months later. And Anthony Fauci said in a press conference this week at the White House that around 30 to 40% of new cases in the US are this BA2 sub-variant. And then there was a CDC report that backed this up, saying 35% of new US coronavirus cases last week were BA2. And that's jumping from 22% the previous week and 16% the week before. But there is some potential positive. news in all of this. And that's that even though, you know, some countries have been criticized by the World Health Organization, deaths are actually still decreasing. There's also a lot of immunity out there from previous Omicron wave. And hopefully spring in the northern hemisphere will mean fewer indoor gatherings and hopefully just an overall reduction in cases. Let us hope on that front. So I think after all that, we need to pivot to something just a little bit lighter, Tim. Oh, thank goodness. I know exactly, right? There's a new study about

orangutans and it studied variations in one of the noises that they make, a noise called kiss squeaks. And we've got a clip here of what that sounds like. Okay, so it does sound like a kiss squeak. Tim, what exactly was the study about? Yeah, I'm very glad you managed to get that clip because I was having nightmares last night about you asking me to recreate it on the show. So, yeah, I absolutely love this one. And this is a story that I read about in The Guardian by the science correspondent there, Nicola Davis. And it's about how. orangutans use slang. So this kiss squeak is a sort of alarm call that orangutans in Borneo and Sumatra use, but there are many, many different variations of it. And a research team, they spent

over 6,000 hours, over five years, listening out for these kiss squeaks and observing what the differences were. And they found that often new calls would appear on the scene and whether they stuck or not tended to depend on the size of the group. So in a small tight-knit group, they didn't come up with new kiss squeaks as often, but when they did, suddenly all the other orangutans would start using this new kiss squeak too. But then in larger groups, there would be orangutans constantly trying to stick out from the crowd coming up with new kiss squeaks, but they wouldn't always stick. It was only occasionally that one would then suddenly become part of the vernacular. That's amazing. It reminds me so much of the way human language evolves. It reminds me of how

TikTok culture evolves. It tells us a lot about ourselves, doesn't it? Yeah, absolutely. The thing that really reminded me of was it's a little bit like mean girls, isn't it? You know, where Gretchen's like, Gretchen, stop trying to make that kiss squeak happen, you know, is that sort of thing. And, yeah, I mean, there's a really nice quote in this story from Adriano Lamera, who was the lead researcher on this. And he says that individuals are wanting to show off their coolness and how much of a rebel they are. Okay, from something that's maybe easy for us to understand, it's something that's harder to understand. The Abel Prize in Mathematics was awarded to Dennis Sullivan for his work in Fusing. theory and topology. First of all, maybe you can explain what the Abel Prize is. There's no Nobel

Prize for mathematics. And so the Abel Prize is sort of the closest thing that there is to it. It is put together by the Norwegian Academy of the Sciences and it's awarded by a member of the Norwegian Royal Family each year. Often it's awarded in a similar way to the Nobel Prize in that it's for a sort of lifetime's worth of achievement. And tell me exactly what it is his research does. I mean, why did he win this prize? Yeah, his research is not the easiest to explain, but he's been at the forefront of this subject called topology, and that is a sort of strange sort of geometry, a strange mathematical way of viewing shapes. And the key thing about it is that in topology, two shapes are considered the same. They're considered to be equal if you can squish one of them into looking the same as another. And this sounds a bit weird. But topology turns out to be really useful for everything from quantum physics, to the study of new materials, and even computer science. And one of the things that Sullivan is particularly known for is managing to connect seemingly different areas of mathematics

using tools like topology. Interesting. Well, congratulations to him. And a last story here. You've brought us one about lettuce that has been genetically modified to prevent bone loss in space. Well, tell us about this. Yeah. So the future of space food is here and it's lettuce. And it's actually pretty cool. So they managed to take some lettuce and genetically modify it so that it could produce this bone forming hormone called parathyroid hormone. And the question is, so why would you want to do that? And well, in space, bones deteriorate really quickly. So on the International Space Station, astronauts lose around 1 to 1.5% of their bone mass each month. And so they have to exercise for two hours a day to try to stave this off. And they have to keep their trips pretty short to around six

months for the most part. And this just wouldn't be possible if we ever want to go to Mars where it takes 10 months to get there in the first place. And then, obviously, you want to spend some time there before coming back again. And so the hope is that something like this new space lettuce could help. If you consumed enough of it each day, then hopefully it could help prevent the bone loss by instead stimulating bone formation. And it seems like it could help people here on Earth too. You know, this hasn't been tested yet, but there are conditions particularly linked to aging where your bones become more brittle and you lose some bone mass and maybe this lettuce would help. But one sort of big caveat on this at the moment is that for an astronaut to

get the right amount of this hormone, they would have to eat 13 ounces of lettuce a day, which is nearly like a whole lettuce every single day, which if you think of the monotony that you've already got in the travel from here to Mars, feels like that's too much to ask an astronaut to have to go through. I guess, but it sounds better than squeezing your lunch out of a tube. Yeah, that's right. And like the hope is that they could grow these on the journey. So it would actually be fresh lettuce. It wouldn't be some weird blended up lettuce kept in a vacuum bag. But the hope is that this is a proof of concept. And in the near future, you might be able to increase the amount of hormone per lettuce leaf. Sounds very cool. Tim Revel is U.S. Deputy Editor

at New Scientist. He's based in New York, New York. Tim, thanks so much for joining us. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. We have to take a break. When we come back, we'll talk about how climate change could make the U.S. more susceptible to West Nile virus. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankosky. We all know the story of Goldilocks and the three bears, right? There are three beds. One's too hard, one's too soft, and one is just right. Now, Goldilocks isn't the only one who thrives in these just right conditions. We've talked about the Goldilocks Zone 4 planets. It's just the right distance from their sun to support life. Turns out some mosquitoes have their own.

Goldilocks zone too. At a certain temperature threshold, the mosquitoes that carry West Nile virus thrive. As climate change makes our world warmer, more places are likely to fall into this Goldilocks zone for mosquitoes who carry the virus. Scientists expect West Nile cases will rise in the future alongside hotter temperatures. Joining me today to talk about this story is my guest Melissa Bailey. She's a writer for Kaiser Health News and an environmental journalism fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder. Welcome to Science Friday, Melissa. Thanks for having me, John. So Melissa, let's start by just talking about how many cases we've seen of West Nile virus in the state where you are in Colorado, for instance. So cases actually tend to fluctuate from year to year, and that's because

humans get West Nile virus from mosquitoes, which get it from birds. So the cases go up and down, depending on these cycles of immunity in birds and in humans. But in Colorado last year, we We saw 11 deaths and over 100 neuroinvasive infections. Those were the highest numbers in 18 years. But next door in Arizona, it was a much different story, even more deaths and more cases. Yeah, they just, the cases were through the roof in Arizona. There were over 100 deaths and over 1,000 neuroinvasive cases, just way higher than previous years. Now, we talked about this Goldilocks zone for mosquitoes.

Explain to us a little bit about what that means. What is the zone that mosquitoes kind of thrive in? Well, the first thing to know is that mosquitoes are cold-blooded, so they're very sensitive to outdoor temperature. It affects every aspect of how they function. The Goldilocks temperature is their favorite temperature at which is easiest to spread disease. I talked to ecologist Marta Shackett, who studies mosquito-borne diseases. If it's too cold, you won't have enough mosquitoes. They won't be growing fast enough.

It will take too long for the virus. to develop inside the mosquito into an infection that can get to their salivary glance and that they can pass on. On the other hand, if it's too hot, they'll actually die too quickly. So it's this middle kind of Goldilocks temperature, not too cold, not too hot, where mosquito-borne diseases are best transmitted. So how is that zone changing right now, Melissa? The mosquito's favorite temperature is staying the same around 75 degrees Fahrenheit. But Shockett found that 70% of people in the U.S. live in places where average summer temperatures are colder than that Goldilocks zone. So as temperatures rise, scientists expect more people to live in climates where it's easier for

mosquitoes to pass on West Nile. Okay, so more people in that zone, more mosquitoes in that zone. So we expect to probably see more of this disease. Now, as we've, as we've, as we've, talked on the show in recent years about the state where you are living right now in Colorado. We talk about it a lot because of drought, the severe drought that you've had there. Now, when I think of mosquitoes, I think of insects that thrive in very wet and humid climates. So explain to us the connection between West Nile virus and this drought. So you're right, John, mosquitoes do need water to breed. But yeah, it's counterintuitive. Research has shown that when there's more drought, there's more West Isle. And one big reason has to do with birds. So birds are important because

that's where mosquitoes pick up the virus and spread it to humans. In really dry conditions, birds gather in greater numbers around these limited water supplies. So that brings them closer to the spots where mosquitoes hang out. And mosquitoes have more chances to pick up the virus from birds. So I talked to Dr. Desiree LeBoe. She's an infectious disease physician at Stanford University. she travels the world studying mosquito-borne diseases. And I reached her in Kenya. Every mosquito has its favorite place to call home. And for Kulex mosquitoes, the mosquitoes that spread West Nile virus, they love stinky, standing water.

So you can imagine if you have a lot of rain, that can actually wash away some of the developing eggs. But climate change can also promote a lot of drought. And having more drought could actually bring more West Nile because you have, more and more stinky standing water which isn't being washed away. So here we have two theories, one about the birds and one about water that are leading to more West Nile when we have drought conditions. Now, West Nile virus for people who haven't followed very closely is a pretty serious disease, but it's not serious in all cases, certainly. What exactly does West Nile do to the body? So most people who get West Nile virus, about 8 and 10, don't have symptoms. The others typically

get a fever and other ailments such as a headache, joint pain, vomiting, or diarrhea. And it's actually important to note that humans can't pass West Nile onto someone else. If a mosquito bites a person with a West Nile infection and then bites another person, the second person won't get West Nile. Okay, so it doesn't spread that way. But it is spread. Through mosquitoes. It spreads from birds to mosquitoes to humans. Tell us about the severe edge of this illness. How exactly severe can West Nile be in people? So some cases are called neuroinvasive. That's when the infection invades the brain or spinal column and can cause serious illness, paralysis, or even death. But these severe cases of West Nile are, they're pretty rare, right?

Yeah, about one case in every 150 is neuroinvasive. It is rare, but, But Dr. LeBaud told me, once you see a case, you never forget it. And the risk of serious illness is higher for people with medical complications and who are over 60 years old. So that's people like Betsy Marston's husband, Ed, who died of West Nile a few years ago. Ed was 78. He loved to hike near their small town in western Colorado. Betsy tells me that might be how he got infected because he was older and recovering from heart surgery. He was at higher risk.

He had uncontrollable shaking, and there's nothing you can do about that. I mean, this disease was just rampaging through him, and he found it very, very difficult to talk. And when he did talk, he said, I'm just suffering through this. That was one of the last things he said. And then it went to his brain. So it was hopeless. It's a brutal disease.

It has no mercy. It just rips through your body and takes you away. Wow, that's quite a story and very sad. We've been focused here on Colorado, where you're reporting is Melissa. But let's zoom out a little bit. We first saw this virus in the U.S. back in the late 1990s in the New York City area. And over the course of the last few decades, it's spread to other parts of the country. We probably haven't heard about it quite as much as other diseases in recent.

years. Did the researchers that you spoke with, say, if other parts of the U.S. could now become vulnerable to West Nile? Yeah, so actually every state in the mainland U.S. has seen West Nile. These mosquitoes are everywhere. And some places in the U.S. may get so hot that mosquitoes will die off quicker and spread less virus. But experts say overall, they expect West Nile infections to increase across the country due to temperature and drought. Are there preventive measures that people can take to avoid getting this disease? Yeah, so these mosquitoes love to come out in the summer at dawn and dusk. Some communities spray pesticide to kill the larvae.

And Betsy points out that there's a lot individuals can do to avoid getting bitten. I can see we needed to be more vigilant. You need long sleeves and you need to be aware of when you're outside. I don't go out at dusk anymore. and I used to never care. It's unpredictable what's happening in our climate now. But we do know that West Nile's here. It's dangerous, and we have to protect ourselves,

and be aware of it. Yeah, so just staying away from mosquito bites is something I remember from that first West Nile outbreak. Melissa, as the world gets warmer, I assume that this isn't the only disease that we're following that could migrate and why. wind up in places that it hasn't been because the climate is changing. Yes, John, it's already happening. Lime disease is a great example. There's evidence that the ticks that spread the

disease have already expanded their range due to climate change. And scientists expects ticks to keep marching north and coming out earlier in the year with hotter temperatures. There's also dengue fever, a tropical mosquito-borne virus. Scientists expect dengue to expand its reach in the United States. And then there are all these waterborne diseases that spread more easily with heavy rainfall or warmer water. One of those is called sequitara fish poisoning. It gives people gastrointestinal trouble and this weird symptom where your sense of hot and cold can be reversed. It's kind of wild. It's been popping up in the Gulf of Mexico and it's expected to spread further as oceans get hotter. So there are many examples of how human-caused climate change is already making people

sicker. And scientists are warning us that as we keep heating the planet, many diseases will spread to new locations and get more people sick. And just one thing to keep in mind is that these diseases hit hardest on vulnerable groups, which often includes children, the elderly, communities of color, and people with low income. Yeah, and that's something especially to watch in areas in the West. There's indigenous communities, other places where health outcomes have already been relatively poor, and more disease spreading across some of these areas could really have a huge impact. Yeah, and it's often the people who are least culpable for climate change that are feeling the largest impacts on their health. Melissa Bailey is a writer for Kaiser Health

News and an environmental journalism fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder. Melissa, thank you so much for sharing the story with us. Thanks so much, John. And you can read the full story on our website, sciencefriiday.com slash west Nile. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO, St. Louis Public Radio, KKMD News. Local science stories of national significance. Bird flu is spreading in the Midwest.

Millions of birds have had to be culled in this spring's outbreak. The last bad year of bird flu was in 2015, so how worried should we be about this year? joining me now to talk about it as my guest, Katie Picus is agriculture reporter for Iowa Public Radio and Harvest Public Media. She's based in Ames, Iowa. Welcome to Science Friday, Katie. Hi, John. So when did this year's bout of bird flu start ramping up? Yeah, so the very first confirmation of this bout of bird flu was in a commercial flock of 29,000 turkeys in Indiana. And that was in early February. And we really saw it start to ramp up in the later part of that. month to now. How exactly does bird flu spread? Yeah, so wild birds like ducks and geese can carry

the virus and shed it through their excrement or saliva and not show any signs of illness. And it's a virus. So once it gets into a flock and a bird starts coughing, for example, bird flu can rapidly spread through those droplets and infect other birds. And I talked with Iowa State University poultry veterinarian Yukosato about how it spreads. So let's listen. So it kind of depends on what signs they manifest in. So for example, if they had respiratory infection, it's going to spread through if they're coughing or sneezing, they'll have droplets that aerosolize and they're spreading it that way. If it manifested into diarrhea, then it'll spread through feces and then that could also be aerosolized and spread through that. They can also do direct contact. So if there's sick birds and they're

contacting each other. It's kind of like, you know, contact to contact there. So that's bird to bird spread, but also a person could step in goose excrement and then walk into a barn and it could spread that way. And Yucosato said bird flu could also come in through contaminated farming equipment, transportation vehicles that are contaminated with the virus. But these possibilities are what she calls weak links. She said that there isn't a concluded study on how exactly bird flu gets into barns. And these possibilities are also why poultry producers are told to practice good sanitation. And that's the things that they can do to keep germs and diseases off of their farms.

And cases of bird flu have been found in Iowa on both commercial and in backyard farms? Yeah, so we've had a handful of confirmations of bird flu in both commercial and backyard flocks. And that includes a couple of large. commercial flocks. In one case, bird flu was confirmed in a commercial flock of more than 915,000 egg-laying hens. And in another case, bird flu reached a commercial flock of 5.3 million egg-laying hens. Wow. So those are enormous flocks. What exactly happens in flocks like these when bird flu is detected? Yeah. So those are enormous flocks. And once bird flu is detected in a flock. State and federal agriculture officials will quarantine the property that's

infected. They'll establish what they call a control zone where they'll alert flock owners within a six-mile radius of the case. And then they have to cull the infected flock. All the birds in that flock have to be culled to prevent bird flu from spreading. So then officials will dispose of the carcasses. The carcasses are usually composted inside of barns or outside on a producer's property. But they can also be buried or even brought to a landfill if the landfill will accept it. And it's a really heartbreaking process for the producers whose flocks are impacted. I mean, these animals are their livelihood. We mentioned the 2015 was the worst year in recent memory for the bird flu.

More than 50 million birds in 15 states had to be called. and 33 million in Iowa alone. Any idea, Katie, about how this year's outbreak could compare to that terrible year? It's still too early to tell. Migratory birds are on the move, and their migration is picking up. So we could see more cases of bird flu happen. But producers and agriculture officials emphasize that they've dealt with this before, and they know more now than they did in 2015,

and that they're more prepared to do. with this. Is there an expectation that this will impact consumers? So in 2015, egg prices soared, but it's still too early to tell how this bird flu outbreak could impact consumers. Chicken prices are already up because of inflation. Egg prices have been consistently higher this year. And here in Iowa, you know, bird flu reached a flock of 5.3 million egg laying hens. And that's a lot of hens, but an economist told me that that's only about 11% of all of the egg laying hens in Iowa alone. And it's a very, very small portion of all of the chickens and turkeys nationally. Because of COVID, of course, I think we're all pretty spooked by the idea of animal to human

transmission of viruses. Can that happen at all with bird flu? So agriculture officials are saying that this is not an immediate health concern for people, and they also emphasize that it's still safe to eat poultry products. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also believes that the risk to human health is low, but they are keeping a close eye on possible human infections. Katie Picus is agricultural reporter for Iowa Public Radio and Harvest Public Media based in Ames, Iowa. Katie, thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. Thanks, John. After the break, searching for planets around other suns. Astronomers know about 5,000 exoplanets by now. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. If you look up at the night sky and find the constellation

Gemini, look toward Pollux, one of the twins. You're not just seeing a bright star, you're also gazing at an exoplanet that was discovered in 2006. It's some 34 light years away, and it's about twice the size of Jupiter. And it's just one of 5,000 confirmed exoplanets tracked by NASA's Exoplanet Archive. A group of planets added to the roles this week took the catalog over this 5,000 milestone. Today it might seem commonplace.

It's a given that stars might have planets around them, but as recently as 1992, there were no known exoplanets. Joining me now to talk about the hunt for exoplanets is Jesse Christensen. She's the NASA Exoplanet Archive Project Science Lead at IPAC Caltech in Pasadena, California. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for being here. Hi, John. Thank you for having me.

So why is this milestone such a big deal for you? Oh, it's exciting for a number of reasons. One is that a celebration, right? We tried for so long to find planets. And as soon as we started finding them, we started realizing they're everywhere. So reaching a number like 5,000 just feels like real validation of the field. Like we've worked so hard. Hooray.

Another thing that's exciting is what we can do with all of those planets, like the questions we can answer now about how planets form and evolve and migrate. And it really is very interesting that we've got this big number now. We can learn so much. So how much do we know about each of these 5,000 at this moment? Yeah, it turns out most of them, we don't know very much. What we know about most of them is their rough size, and we know how long it takes them to orbit their star, so their year.

And that tells us how hot the planets are. If you're very close to your star, then you're very hot. If you're far away, then you're very cold. So we know they're rough size and they're rough temperature. That's it for most of the 5,000. I want to take a step back and talk about how you actually find a planet that could be dozens of light years away. Just explain it to us what it is you're looking for.

So the most successful planet hunting technique that accounts for two-thirds or more of the 5,000 planets is called the transit method. Now, what we're doing with that is we're actually just monitoring the brightness of the star over and over and over again for years at a time sometimes. And we're just waiting for little dips in the brightness because that means a planet could have orbited in front of that star and blocked some of the light. So if you see these dips, then you look at the star with other telescopes

and you confirm that you're actually really seeing a planet. So what are the other techniques? If that accounts for most of the planets that you've seen, what else have you used to find these planets? Yeah, so there's also something called the radial velocity method or the Doppler method. This relies on the fact that planets, as they orbit their stars, are actually tugging on their stars the same way the stars are tugging on their planets.

So, for instance, in our solar system, Jupiter is actually dragging our sun around the middle of the solar system on a roughly 12-year orbit. So when we look at other suns, other stars in the sky, we can actually see them wobbling as well. So then you can measure from the size of the wobble and the duration of the wobble, how big a planet must be to be pulling on the star in that way. We've also found planets using direct imaging. So that's for the very nearby planets. If you're very careful, you can block out the light from the star and actually search around the star

for nearby faint glowing blobs, basically, which turn out to be hot young planets. And another successful technique is microlensing, which relies on relativity, basically, that everything with mass bends space time, planets bend space time. So if you carefully monitor some stars, you can actually see them warped by the planets that orbit between us and the star. Wow, so some very direct methods and some pretty indirect methods in there in terms of how you find planets. Yes, exactly. So you say 5,000 confirmed exoplanets. What exactly does it take to confirm one and how confident are you in all of those 5,000?

Right. So there's two ways to get a planet into the NASA's exoplanet archive. One is to measure its mass and show that it's truly a planetary mass object. It's not big enough to be a star. And you can use the radial velocity method for that, for instance, or the microlensing method. Another is to show statistically that it's much more likely to be a planet than anything else. So you look at all of the other possible scenarios that could have created this signal in your data and you rule them all out one by one.

You say it couldn't be a background star. It couldn't be an instrument glitch. And then when you have odds of better than 100 to 1 that the signal that you see is a planet, then we say, okay, you've statistically shown it's a planet and it can go in the archive. If we found about 5,000, what does this tell us about how many there actually are out there? there? Is there any way to extrapolate these numbers and say, okay, well, we found 5,000 of them? That must mean we have X number of more planets out there to find. That's the really overwhelming part of reaching this milestone, because we've really only searched our local

solar neighborhood. We've only really looked around us in the galaxy. So if you extrapolate over the hundreds of billions of stars just in our Milky Way, that means there's likely tens of billions of planets. How many places like our own solar system with a range of planet types and have we found? You know, that's really interesting. We might be more unique than we would have expected. When we look at planetary systems around other stars, what we see is that they mostly have similar planets around them. So a star will have a lot of small planets or a lot of big planets. And it's actually not as common to see a mix like we have an our solar system. We're still extending our observations so that we can test that. But at the moment, we really think that our

solar system might be an uncommon arrangement of planets. So is there an average planet, your collection? You've said that around many of these stars, you'll see planets that are often of a similar type. Are you finding a similar type of planet amongst these 5,000? The most common kind of planet we've found is actually a surprise, because it's not a kind of planet we have in our solar system. We call it a super-earth, and it's up to two times as big and 10 times as heavy as our Earth. And that's really interesting because we don't have one, so we don't know what they're like. We don't know whether they're big rocks. We don't know whether they're little ice giants like scaled down Neptunes. So they're a big mystery, but they seem like

they're the most common kind of planet that we found so far. Is there something about that size range that might make it easier for us to find? Like, is there a minimum viable size of a planet that you could actually see using any of these different techniques that you use? That's a really great question. And it is very difficult to find planets as small as Earth. NASA had a mission called Kepler, which was trying to do this and still couldn't quite get there. In the scheme of things, Earth is really small. So it's very difficult to find them. But we know enough to be able to extrapolate how common we think Earth should be.

And we still think that super-Earths, which are, as you say, easier to find because they're bigger, are more common. In terms of Earth's size, you say it might be hard to find. If we were standing on one of these other exoplanets, do you think we'd be able to see the Earth? Yes. And actually, there was a really interesting result that just came out last year where a pair of astronomers actually looked at all of the stars. that could possibly see us transiting, right? You know, this geometry that I talked about where a planet has to be lined up

just right to block some of the light. We know what stars could look and see us transiting. And those stars have actually been the subject of searches from like the SETI Institute to say like, hey, if you can see us, maybe we could see you. Amongst these planets, is there an average distance from the sun and temperature?

Are you finding planets of a certain temperature out there amongst their suns? that one's harder to answer because that really depends on how long we've been searching around a given star for. It's easier to find the close-in hot planets because, for instance, they transit more often. Like if you were looking at our sun, Mercury would transit much more often than Venus and more often than Earth. So we're very sensitive to the close-in hot things, and we have found thousands of close-in hot things. We're still incomplete in our searches out here around where Earth is at the cooler temperatures. So it's a bit hard to say yet where, for instance, the peak of planet occurrence is and distance

from the star. But that's something we're really trying to answer with our next generation telescopes. Yeah, and this is something we talk about an awful lot. There's this question of the Goldilocks zone, the distance from a star that would allow a planet like Earth to support life. How many of those are out there of the 5,000 do you think? That's the million billion trillion dollar question. So so far, we haven't found any planets like the Earth in the Goldilocks zone of a star like the sun. We have found planets like the Earth in the Goldilocks zone of much smaller, much cooler stars called M dwarfs. And actually most of the stars in the galaxy are M dwarfs. So it might be that

habitable Goldilocks zone real estate is common throughout the galaxy. But there's a big question, which is can planets around M dwarfs, which are a very different kind of star than our sun, actually support life. And we don't know the answer to that yet. Are there certain types of stars around which you find more planets than others? Yeah, these M dwarfs actually seem like they're really, really good at making rocky planets, for instance, which was a surprise because I think a lot of us expected that bigger stars would make more planets. You know, they're starting from a bigger amount of gas and dust, the bigger protoplanetary disk with material to form planets. But it seems like maybe those bigger stars,

you know, they put out a lot of radiation, maybe they blow a lot of the gas, gas and dust away, and they're not as efficient at turning that into planets, whereas small stars seem like they're very good at converting their protoplanetary disks into actual planets. So we see many more planets around small stars than around big stars, which is a surprise. Amongst your colleagues and the people who do this work, are there differences of opinion on how you define a planet or how you should define a planet? That's a very timely question. Just earlier this week, the International Astronomical Union, famous for demoting Pluto in 2000.

decided to put out a proposal for what the definition of an exoplanet should be. So an exoplanet is a planet around another star. And we're already fighting about what the definition of planet is around our own star. So we haven't really settled yet. There is debate. And what I'll say is that the different archives online that try and keep track of these things, we all have our own criteria that we've kind of settled on scientifically and politically, like this is our box that we're going to fill.

So there are definitely different criteria. there is not consensus yet about, for instance, if you have a planetary mass object just free-floating in the galaxy, is it a planet? Because it's not orbiting a star, but it's planetary mass. So that's one of the open questions right now. Do you call that a planet or not? Interesting. Okay. So what are you most excited about right now in exoplanet research? What's the next big thing? Well, everyone is really excited about James Webb. So this just launched in December. It's currently going through its commissioning right now. And one of the most exciting things about the James Webb Space Telescope is, is that it'll give us the ability to find out so much more about the planets.

So remember I said at the start, we really only know their sizes and their temperatures. So James Webb will let us peer into the atmospheres and onto the surfaces of these planets to look for things like clouds and structures and surfaces and surface materials and compositions. It's super exciting. They'll turn from just like dots on a plot into real 3D world with data associated with them, which I'm really excited about. The NASA test mission is flying right now. That's NASA's current planet hunting mission. It's doing an all-sky survey for planets transiting the very brightest stars.

And those planets will end up being the targets for James Webb for further characterization. So yes, test is a very prolific mission, which is being very successful right now that I'm also working on. I'm talking with Jesse Christensen. She's the NASA Exoplanet Archive Project Science Lead at IPAC Caltech in Pasadena, California. I'm John Dankowski, and this is Science Friday. from WNYC Studios. Do you have a favorite exoplanet? That's like asking a mother to choose between her children.

Between her 5,000 children. Between her 5,000 children. My favorite is always the next one, right? Like people are like, you know, it's 5,000. Don't you have enough? And it's not just a number, right? It's not just 5,000. Every one of these is a whole new planet, a new world.

Like think about the diversity just in our solar system, right? And each world has personality and has features and is different. So of these 5,000, you know, they're all amazing and incredible and rich worlds that I just can't wait to learn more about. And then personally, there's a system called K2138, which I love. It was found by citizen scientists. So that's people just like your listeners at home on their computers looking through NASA data and helping us find planets.

It's got six planets around it. And the inner five planets play music. They're in a resonance. and they actually, if you put that to music, it actually plays like twinkle, twinkle little star. It's really sweet. That's so amazing. It's just amazing to think about, isn't it?

Yeah, it's so much fun. It's so much fun. So if you were to go to one of these planets to take an up-close look, though, and do tests and learn a little bit more about, is there one of these planets that you think about an awful lot? Yeah. So one of our big holdouts is Kepler 452B.

So I mentioned that Kepler was our planet hunting telescope that we were trying to find Earth-like planets with, and we just couldn't quite get there. And Kepler 452B is as close as we got. So we think it's about one and a half times the size of the Earth, which is where we start to get worried that it's not going to be predominantly rocky with a thin atmosphere anymore like Earth,

but something more like a scaled-down Neptune, so an ice giant sort of thing. So we're not sure if it's rocky. So that's one mystery I would love to solve just to get there and to know whether it's rocky. We know it's in the habitable zone of a star like the sun, but the other mystery about Kepler 452B is whether it's actually

there or not. So the signal we see in the Kepler data is a lot like a type of noise that we also see in the Kepler data. So either it's the very closest thing we found to an Earth-like planet with Kepler if it's rocky and has a thin atmosphere, or it's not there. So I would really love to go there and solve that mystery because it has plagued us for a decade at this point. Do you think that we will double this number of exoplanets, triple it? I mean, how many more exoplanets will we find over the course of, I don't know, say your career? Oh, I, you know, hundreds of thousands is the prediction. So for instance, NASA is launching the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in five years or so, and it's going to do a survey of the center of the galaxy where most of the stars are. And it's expected to

find 100,000 planets just on its own. Planets are everywhere. That's the big discovery of the last 30 years. It's everywhere we look, we see planets. And so as our technology and our instruments improve, we're just going to find more and more. And I'm hoping we find more and more interesting planets. And I'm hoping we find more Earth-Black planets. Almost all the people I would think who are listening to Science Friday right now get really excited about the idea of a search for new life, a search for new planets. But there are a lot of people who say, look, we've got a lot of problems here on Earth.

Why are we spending so much money and time and all these bright scientific minds looking for planets that will never be able to get to? And I'm sure people say that to you too. What do you tell them? Yeah, so usually I have two answers. One is that the question of are we alone is one of humanity's most fundamental earliest, oldest questions in this whole vast universe and all of its potential and all of its possibility, could it possibly just be us?

Are we alone? That's such a huge question to answer. And the second is, if we can study the planets around us, we'll work out what our fate will be. You hear that in five billion years, the sun will be. expand to become a red giant and expand out to the orbit near Earth. And then after that, it's going to slough off its outer layers and become a white dwarf, which is just a little cooling ball of carbon and oxygen. And they're just going to cool forever. And there's been a lot of open questions about what does that mean for Earth? Like, what does that mean for us? What's our fate?

And one of the discoveries of the last five years is planets around white dwarfs. It's possible to survive that phase of a star going into a red giant and becoming a white dwarf. And, you know, that means that the trillions of years that our sun will spend as a white dwarf, it might be possible that there's a second stage of planet life after this red giant phase. So I think, you know, that's a really important question as well, not just like where did we come from and are we alone, but where are we going? That is a good place to leave our conversation. Jesse Christensen is NASA Exoplanet Archive Project Science Lead at IPAC, Caltech in Pasadena, California.

Congratulations on this milestone, and thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. It was a pleasure. And if you're into all things out of this world, have you ever considered Mars? Yeah, you can actually see that with your naked eye. The SciFri Book Club is still talking about Sarah Stewart Johnson's epic tale about the search for life on the red planet. The book is The Sirens of Mars. And if you want to jump into the fun, it may even learn a few things. Check out our website.

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