Science Friday - Vaping Sickness, Teaching Science. Aug 30, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: August 30, 2019

Over 10 million Americans vape, or smoke electronic cigarettes. E-cigarettes are also the most popular tobacco product among teenagers in this country. Some of them are marketed with bright colors and fun flavors like chocolate, creme brulee, and mint—or they’re advertised as a healthier alternative to regular cigarette smoking. But last week, public health officials reported that a patient in Illinois died from a mysterious lung illness linked to vaping. In 29 states across the country, there are 193 reported cases of this unknown illness as of August 30. Most patients are teenagers or young adults and have symptoms like difficulty breathing, chest pain, vomiting, diarrhea, and fatigue. Patients with more severe cases have to be put on oxygen tanks and ventilators—and some may suffer from permanent lung damage. “Acute lung injury happens in response to all kinds of things, like inhaling a toxic chemical or an infection. This is similar to what we’d see there. The lungs’ protective response gets turned on and doesn’t turn off,” Dr. Frank Leone, a professor of medicine and the director of the Comprehensive Smoking Treatment Program at the University of Pennsylvania, tells Science Friday in a phone call earlier this week. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is still investigating the cause, but the illness is raising questions about the health effects of a growing smoking trend and how it should be regulated. “It’s sort of a Wild West out there,” Anna Maria Barry-Jester, a senior correspondent for Kaiser Health News, tells SciFri on the phone about current regulation of electronic cigarettes. Ira talks with Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Dr. Frank Leone about the illness and vaping’s health effects. It’s back to school season for everyone: students, teachers, and Science Friday. Our Educator Collaborative is back with nine teaching resources from nine amazing educators—all inspired by Science Friday media. From a lesson in sauropod digestion, complete with simulated poop (yes, it’s gross), to inventing a way to get plastic out of the oceans, these resources offer learners in the classroom or at home chances to engage directly with complex science and engineering topics. Program member Andrea La Rosa, an eighth-grade science teacher from Danbury Connecticut, joins Ira to talk about a topic near to our hearts: analog and digital technology. She explains how she used a drawing activity to help her students understand how the two kinds of signals are different. Plus, in a world that’s getting increasingly complicated, with more concepts to learn every year, how do you make the most of students’ time in science class? Science Friday education director Ariel Zych talks about the ways educators are teaching young learners to learn, think critically, and take on increasingly high-tech concepts. 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 Ira Flato coming to you today from the studios of WSHU in Fairfield, Connecticut. Over 10 million American adults, vape, or smoke electronic cigarettes. And in fact, e-cigarettes are also the most popular tobacco product among teenagers in the United States. Some of them are marketed with bright colors and fun flavors like chocolate, creme brulee and mint. Or they're advertised as a healthier. alternative to regular cigarette smoking. But last week, one person died from a mysterious lung illness linked to vaping. And across the country in dozens of states from Utah to Wisconsin to Illinois, hundreds of

people have been hospitalized because of this unknown illness. The CDC is still investigating the cause, but the illness is raising questions about the health effects of a growing smoking trend and how it should be regulated. Anna Maria Barry Jester is a senior correspondent for Kaiser Health News. She's been reporting on this illness and the vaping industry, and we want to welcome her to Science Friday. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Can you describe the illness for us?

What are the symptoms? How does it progress? Yeah, it's a little bit different in different patients, but right now we know that it's a very serious illness, as you said, somebody, one person in Illinois died, and it can take on a variety of forms. So several people have been ill for many weeks by the time. they're presenting with pneumonia-like symptoms in trouble breathing. Some people have lost incredible amounts of weight, you know, 10, 20, 40 pounds and had incredible

GI distress before they even showed up with problems breathing. And what about the treatments? How are they treated? Well, because they, so far all these cases don't seem to be infectious. They're treating the most successful treatment has been with steroids, sort of essentially to reduce inflammation and treat the pneumonia. Will some people have permanent lung damage from this? That's unclear.

Some people so far do continue to have reduced lung function. Other people seem to have made pretty miraculous recoveries, so I think it'll be at some time before we know exactly what the long-term effects will be. And when was the first case of this reported? So this outbreak is being defined as cases that started in late June until, you know, the present. There have been cases reported in the medical literature in the past that sort of appear to be very similar to what's going on right now, dozens of cases in journals and at medical conferences, that sort of thing. But this particular outbreak is starting in late June. And what do

investigators know about the cause of this? So they haven't said much. This morning the CDC gave us a little bit more information. Several of the cases are linked to vaping cannabis products that were sold sort of in the black market. Others don't seem to be. Other people have reported just vaping nicotine-based products. So there's a lot of, there's not much clarity there, and people are pretty anxious for more information on that front. And have we ever seen something like this before? I mean, these products are very new, in a sense. So they've been around for a decade or so in the United States, but the trend of, you know, kind of mass usage that we have right now is only a few years old. And as I said, there have been cases reported in the past, but we haven't seen something

like this with many, many cases at once. And how is vaping regulated right now? That's a great question, and it's very complicated. It involves multiple administrations, lots of lawsuits. Right now, according to the ex-commissioner of the FDA, Scott Gottlieb, who's sort of the last person who had the ability to regulate e-cigarettes, they're regulated by companies must label them as potentially addictive. They can't be sold to kids under 18 and 21 in some.

States, companies must comply with manufacturing standards. But it is sort of a complicated regulatory history. Originally, the FDA tried to prevent them from being imported to the United States. Several e-cigrat manufacturers sued them, said these are not drug delivery devices, therefore you can't regulate them. And a judge ruled on his side and said that, on the side, excuse me, of the companies, and said that if they aren't selling them as cessation devices or, you know, tools to help quit smoking, then they must be regulated as tobacco products. Are there any cities or states taking action on preventing more of these cases while the CDC is investigating?

Yes, many. And I should add that companies are being required to submit market applications, basically to sell these products by next year. So there is a regulatory process that's now underway. There are places all over the country that are looking to do their own kinds of regulation. So San Francisco is definitely one of these other parts of the Bay Area. There are other states as well. And it has created this very weird situation where there are places in the country where there's limitations on e-cigarettes, but not tobacco. So you can buy, you know, you can buy traditional cigarettes, but there's limitations in the e-cigarettes. It's a very strange and complicated regulatory space right now. I guess we're in uncharted territory in all of this.

Well, thank you very much for taking time to be with us today. Good luck. Thanks, sir. Thank you. Anna Maria Barry, Jesser, is a senior correspondent for Kaiser Health News. Here to tell us more about the health effects of vaping and answer your questions is Dr. Frank Leone. He's Professor of Medicine and the Director of Comprehensive Smoking Treatment Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. Thanks so much for having me. Let's just start with the basics about what vaping is, how it's different than, you know, cigarette smoking in general.

Right. So the device actually uses a heating element across which you draw a solution of various organic chemicals, including nicotine and other flavorings. The heat causes a chemical reaction in that solution and aerosolizes the solution. You breathe that in. Some of the constituents of the aerosol are absorbed by the body. And then you exhale the remainder out into the environment. that exhaled a bit is concentrated propylene glycol, which actually gives it the look of artificial smoke. Huh, and so how is it different? How is the smoke different from a traditional cigarette and its effect on your lungs? Right. The traditional cigarette uses the sort of solid tobacco. You combust it, add heat through flame.

The heat releases a lot of the constituents, in both vapor and particle form that you inhale that. One of the sort of promising elements of electronic cigarettes when they were first introduced was that you don't have to use combustion. And generally speaking, the products of combustion are highly variable and there's a lot of carcinogens in combustion products.

The hope was that by not relying on flame, but instead just simply applying heat, you would end up with a lot fewer of these toxic elements. That's turning out, in some respects that's true. There's far fewer carcinogens in general on average in electronic cigarette aerosol. But there's a lot of different chemicals and a lot of different sort of physical attributes of the aerosol that are coming home to roost at this point. An intended unexpected consequences.

That's right. How could vaping cause an illness like the kind that? we're seeing now? Well, one of the lungs' primary responsibilities is to protect us from the outside world, right? The lungs are one major organ in the body that's in direct contact with the outside environment. And so the lungs are highly vascular, very rich in blood supply. And when bits of the outside world enter into the inside world and become a threat to the

inside world, the lungs have to respond by allowing, by activating this in front. inflammatory cascade. It's a complicated set of responses that include recruitment of white blood cells to the area, leaky capillaries to sort of try and wall off the part of the lung that's being exposed to this potential toxicant. And so what we're seeing right now is the lungs, essentially a protective response that the lung is using to try and keep whatever's going on outside, outside, and not let it get inside. The problem is, is that the, you know, you You can imagine that this inflammatory cascade has to have sort of the gas pedal and the brake pedal. It has to have a pro-inflammatory set of components, but it also has to be able to regulate how far that inflammation goes.

And in some folks, a lot of the variability that Anna Maria was talking about is because some folks don't have, the brakes don't get applied soon enough. And so there's this unregulated or unopposed, I should say, inflammatory cascade that ends up causing illness. You know, speaking with you now, you don't seem surprised then. Yeah. I'm really not surprised. I'm disappointed. I wish it weren't happening. I feel bad for the children, the patients and their families who are surprised.

But this is the syndrome that Anna Maria described is actually a really. reasonably common response to all kinds of things, all kinds of attacks from the outside world that the lung has to endure. So at the opener you mentioned, you know, infections, bacterial infections or pneumonia, we sometimes see this kind of response with pneumonia or a viral infection. For most of us, when we deal with these threats, it's self-limited, it's more or less trivial. There's a bit of a cough, maybe some shortness of breath, the wheeze, and we get over it. But if the amount of toxicant is, you know, if there's a big bolus of toxicant that's introduced into the lung, and the lung is in the wrong place at the wrong time, the potential exists for this inflammatory response to go on unabated.

Some people have said that this illness is possibly related to THC cartridges. What do you think of that explanation? Well, you know, I can't say that the THC is not related, but I'll point out a couple of things. You know, people have been aerosolizing THC in the form of marijuana or vaporizers really for a very long time. And we don't see this syndrome purely in response to THC. So if the THC is related, it has to have something to do with the way the THC interacts with this device. with this device. The way the device heats up the THC, the solution that the THC has to be diluted in, the size of the particles that are delivered to the lung, the temperature of the particles, all those

things matter. And so I think it's, first of all, too early to blame THC. There's a lot of cases in this cohort that's being described now that we're not exposed to THC. There was no discernible THC in the blood. So that's number one. But number two, it can't just be about the THC. It has to be about the device and the way the THC is delivered. We're talking about the health effects of vaping with my guest, Dr. Frank Leone. He's Professor of Medicine and Director of the Comprehensive Smoking Treatment Program

at the University of Pennsylvania. You can tweet us at SciFRI, S-I-FRI, if you'd like to submit some questions. questions. This is really interesting stuff. Let's go to some reaction we've gotten from the web. Omid from Iran asked this question through our Science Friday Vox Pop app. Since I'm a non-smoker, I want to know if vaping has any bad effect on my health. Yeah. Can you answer that, Dr. Leone? Yeah. So, so far, all we really have are good sort of observational series. In other words, we watch over a big group about 3,500 people over the course of several years and look to see what

happened to their health in one of four conditions, either people who didn't inhale anything, tobacco or e-cigarettes, people who used e-cigarettes alone, people who use tobacco alone or people who use both. And it turns out that, of course, as you would imagine, the group that had the least symptoms, either respiratory or cardiovascular symptoms, were those that didn't use anything. that used electronic cigarettes were next up. They were less than cigarettes, but more than nothing. And folks that used both were the worst. So somehow, it turns out that a lot of adults who use electronic cigarettes are also using tobacco at the same time. And that's probably the worst situation. The exposure to both the tobacco smoke and the electronic cigarette aerosol

seems to have some sort of synergistic or additive effect. Are people who are around it secondhand smoke from vape smoke? Are they just as vulnerable? Yeah, so there's nothing different about vape aerosol that you inhale either primarily through the mouthpiece or secondarily from after it's been expired from the user. the there's you know we don't have a lot of information there's not a lot of good data on people who are consistently or in high concentrations exposed to sort of secondhand aerosol but there's nothing different about the aerosol so we're in effect because we use you know we don't have enough data of doing a

long-term giant multi-million person experiment right here of people That's exactly correct. I think that there have been a lot of folks who have been on either side of this debate, either for it or against it, and have adopted significant sort of advocacy positions in either direction. The problem I see from sort of a community or societal point of view is that we are smack in the middle of a large population-based experiment, and the Tragedy will be that someday we will have these answers, and it will come down to epidemiologists like those from the CDC, Wisconsin, and Illinois to give us the answers, rather than trying to figure out what we're dealing with in advance so that people know, have informed, have

information with which to make their decisions. I have another listener question we got on the Science Friday Vox Pop app about a vaping health issue. This one is from Jacob in Missouri. I've heard a lot of people talk about vaping can cause popcorn lung. So my question is, what is that? And how likely are you to get it from vaping? Dr. Leone? So popcorn long was an interesting epidemiologic kind of event many years ago. When you go to the movies or when you open up a package of microwave popcorn, the stuff that they use to create the butter flavor is not actually butter. It's oil with a compound called diacetyl in it.

And diacetyl gives that buttery flavor and that buttery texture and that smell that we all like so much. And what epidemiologists notice is that people in the popcorn butter industry were developing scarring illnesses in the lung. They were developing a lot of respiratory symptoms, chronic respiratory symptoms, and evidence of lung scarring and discards. construction and they were able to identify the exposure as that diacetyl and it turns out that a lot of the

flavorants that are used in electronic cigarettes when they cross that heating element that we talked about actually produce pretty significant amounts of diacetyl and so even though they haven't been on the market long enough for us to identify popcorn lung in these folks their chances are pretty good that with consistent long-term exposure. We're going to see some scarring events. Do you think we need some regulation? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I couldn't agree more with Anna Maria's point of view. I know for a fact that the FDA is of the right mindset. They want to regulate this. They're smack in the middle of a pretty complicated bureaucratic process. I think that part of the complication has come down

to this imagined risk-benefit ratio. You know, maybe we can help some people by leaving electronic cigarettes on the market if it helps them to not be smokers. That sort of risk-benefit calculation, I believe, is probably changing as we speak. And hopefully this series will add some urgency to the regulatory process.

Well, we do hope we inform people and they can make informed decisions. But Dr. Leoni, we've run out of time. I want to thank you. This has been great, Ira. Thanks so much for your interest here. You're welcome. Dr. Frank Leone is Professor of Medicine and Director of the Comprehensive Smoking Treatment Program at the University of Pennsylvania. One of the biggest problems in marine biology, it's a very basic one. How do you study ocean life? Well, some of the ocean's most delicate creatures, you have brittle coral, miniature squids, squishy jellyfish.

They can't survive the journey to the lab for further study. So marine scientists are looking to bring the lab to them. And this week, scientists report making progress towards that goal with a six-fingered robotic gripper. You've got to see this thing. The soft robotic can can gently catch and release something as delicate as a jellyfish, which is 95% water, do this without harming it. Here to tell us how this jellyfish gripper and other soft robotics are making it possible to build a future underwater life. lab is David Gruber, Professor of Biology at Baruch College at the City University of New York. Dr. Gruber, welcome to Science Friday.

Thanks so much, our pleasure to be here. You're welcome. So you're a marine biologist. Why is it so difficult to study things like jellyfish? I think, you know, we do our work sometimes a kilometer under the ocean. So when we're working down there, it's really hard to just stick our hand out of the submarine and set up a lab bench. So we've been working over the last several years of designing something with the dexterity of a human hand that we could use underwater.

And I watched the video of how this was working, and it's sort of like long fingers. You describe it to us, how it works. Well, these specific soft robotics, they're ultra gentle, and they're known, we call them lovingly in the lab as fetichini fingers, because they look almost like a piece of fetichini. And, but when you could touch something with it, they are one-tenth of the pressure of the human eyelid resting on the eyeball. So they're just incredibly gentle. Wow. So this allows you to then sort of gently hold the jellyfish underwater so you don't have to take it out and then you can study it, study them that way? Yeah, that's exactly correct.

And this is part of a longstanding collaboration with the Harvard Microbotics Lab. And I was showing a video at National Geographic using this hard metal claw. And I was having a hard time working with a sample. And Rob Wood, who heads that lab, kind of came up to me afterwards and started peppering me with questions about what I use to interact with animals. And he ended it with, have you heard of soft robotics? And the answer was no. Why can't you just put a jar in there? Yeah, I mean, you could.

Why could you? Okay, so what's the drawback to that? Well, I mean, you could put a jar and there's something known as a D sampler. Essentially the jellyfish would just fall into the jar and then a lid would come over and close up on the jellyfish. But in that scenario, we would still have to bring the animal to the surface to do any further work. And I think as a marine biologist, I got into marine biology due to a really deep love for marine

animals and empathy and working with them. about bringing these animals from the deep sea where they're incredibly beautiful and have this form and then seeing them, you know, as this blob on the surface dead is really not satisfying. So this is a way to be able to interact and work with animals in their own setting and essentially we like to not kill them. It's a little bit like giving them a doctor's checkup where we would come in and we could swab them and take their DNA and take physiological measurements. We could even 3D scan them and print out an exact replica at the surface and essentially then open it up and let this jellyfish swim away. It's really amazing. Have you

have you gotten to test this new jellyfish gripper out there in real life yet? We, well, we've, it's I feel a little bit like Q in James Bond working with working with the Harvard Microbotics Lab where I tell them a scenario. And I particularly chose jellyfish just because they're so difficult. And when working with this lab, I'd like to give them just incredible challenges. So this animal that almost falls apart in the hand asking them, can you develop me a soft robot, an ultra gentle robot that can help me study this animal and not hurt it. And we started out at the New England Aquarium.

And we did our first test there. But there's a whole suite of delicate soft robotic devices that are coming out of the micro-robotics lab that are allowing us to better understand deep sea life. And let's talk about this isn't the first robot you've worked on, right? There's another underwater gripper that also catches delicate sea creatures. How does that one work? Yeah, well, one of them, we try to come up with nice names for them. So the first one was just called squishy robot fingers.

And then the next one that you're mentioning was something called a rotary actuated dodecahedron, which is kind of a mouthful. And what that is, it's essentially something like it's origami inspired. So it starts out as a flat sheet and with one rotation it turns into a sphere. And in this scenario, we would approach a jellyfish and we would enclose the jellyfish inside this rad device, say, as a way to keep it in place. And then once we have it in place now, the goal is to use these fetichini ultra gentle fingers to go around it and to swab the jellyfish and to do any other physiological measurements in sort.

Would you be using these tools during the same dive? Yeah. The idea is essentially to, one of the real goals is just to not. stress out the animal and to and to not hurt it and we try to use tandem as many things as we can on the same dive so it's like it's been a real stepwise process even on the first dive when when I was working with with with with this laboratory we didn't know if the squishy robot fingers would just implode at depth so we the first one we actually just brought one of these

down with us and just took a a camera and just to visualize what what happened and it was fine. And you have enough funding for this and people can support it? They make it practical? Yeah, this started out in is a National Geographic Innovation Challenge grant. So it started out as a really small grant. We now have an NSF grant where next year we'll be going to see and testing this out with the Schmidt Oceanographic Institute.

So it's doing okay and it's and what we really, love is that how it's catching on, that marine biologists really, we were using tools from the oil and gas and the military to do heavy construction underwater. And there's not been a real big effort to design incredibly delicate tools for us. So we're slowly seeing this being adopted by other members of the marine biological community. Amira Flato? This is Science Friday on WN1C Studios. I'm talking with David Gruber, Professor of Biology at Brook College at City University

of New York, about his way of gently catching jellyfish. I'm glad you're getting funding because I don't want to see you on Shark Tank trying to get those sharks to protect your jellyfish. So see what I did there. Sorry. What are you most interested, Dr. Gruber, in learning from the jellyfish? I mean, jellyfish are interesting to me just because they're this animal that you're that everybody's experienced, everybody's seen a jellyfish, but we all have different impressions.

Some people remind them of being stung at the beach and it's ruined their vacation. Other people have it as their screensavers. So they're this really kind of mysterious alien life forms, but they do have superpowers. There's a molecule called green fluorescent protein that was discovered from a jellyfish in the 60s, which led to a Nobel Prize in 2008. And that's really revolutionized experimental biology, how we see the inside of cells, how we see gene expression. There's another thing about jellyfish now

is that I'm thinking about the oldest animals on our planet. And jellyfish have a trait, and you may have heard of the immortal jellyfish, where they, once they're an adult, they can actually have the capability of reverting back into youth. So these animals that are kind of right under our nose just have some of these just incredibly remarkable features that we can learn more about. Is it just the features or could it be some of the biochemicals they have in their bodies that might be of interest to us? Everything.

And it's really about, you know, I think one of the real premise of this work is about how we approach life. and even something as backwater as a jellyfish is something that we should, when we approach and we encounter this animal, that we should value it and try not to kill it as we study it. It has been around a long time. Yep, 500 million years. So that's the other thing. I think of the state of where humans are and how we're kind of bringing on our own extinction event. And here is this mysterious drifting animal out there that has so much to teach us. So you think they're going to outlast the human race is what you're saying.

Absolutely. You must be working on the next product. You know, then you must be working on an improvement, I'll bet. There's always, you know, I think that's with working. So I did this fellowship at Harvard, Radcliffe fellow, where I got to spend a year as a biologist to be a fly on the wall in this robotic lab. And it's just completely impressive in how they work and the dedication and it's build and rebuild and build. And even with this ultra-gental fetaccini finger, we went through several iterations of fail until we were able to grasp the jellyfish correctly. Well, as most people in science, no failure is an option.

Thank you, David Gruber. My pleasure. Taking time to be with us today. Good luck on your next project. And on this one. Thanks for having me. David Gruber, Professor of Biology at Baruch College at the City University of New York. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. You can feel it in the air. The days are getting shorter. There's a break in the heat.

And everybody is going back to school. And that includes Science Friday. We have a whole team devoted to turning the great science you learn from SciFri into resources for school classrooms and other educational settings. And this year, our education team has been hard at work with a group of dedicated, passionate science teachers and educators crafting a whole set of new classroom resources inspired by Science Friday interviews, articles, and videos. Think of your favorite science lesson from school. Then imagine hunting archaeological digs for clues about past civilizations, designing ways to get plastic out of the oceans, or exploring sauropod digestion, complete. with simulated poop. Oh, yeah. These are just a few of the things students can learn, hands-on, in new resources from the Science Friday Educator Collaborative,

here with me today. Let me bring them on. Andrea LaRosa, science teacher at Westside Middle School Academy in Danbury, Connecticut, and a member of this year's Science Friday Educator Collaborative. Welcome. Hi, thanks for having me. And Ariel Zitch, our education director for Science Friday.

Hey, hey there, Ariel. How's it going? Well, let me start with you. With that time, again, we have our educator collaborative partners. What have they been working so hard on? So these educators are, like all educators, creative, ambitious, collaborative people. And so what we've done is really just invited them to work on something that they think would bring science or math alive for their students. So they've gotten full creative autonomy, the editorial and publication and promotional support of science Friday behind them.

And then we just let them free and we let them create whatever they want to for their students. Well, Andrea, when we set you free, you decided to tackle digital and analog signals and the difference between them, which I find really fascinating. Good. Tell us about that. Is it a difficult topic for an eighth grader to tackle? I don't think it has to be. They use technology all the time. It's just a matter of them understanding how it works.

So that's what I really wanted to focus on in my resource is to, take the idea of how these signals are transmitted and stored and made it, make accessible activities for the students and teachers. Well, let's talk about that. How do you help eighth graders understand these concepts? So for example, one of the first activities I did is just a simulation activity in which the students actually transmit digital and analog signals. It's a lot like a game, so it's great for the eighth graders.

It's like as if Pictionary and Telephone had a baby. So that's kind of the game that they're playing. And the first person is given a little analog alien, so all of the lines are rounded just like an analog wave would be. And they try to copy it as best as they can, pass it to the next person, they make a copy of the copy and so on until it's been copied about five times, and then they get to see how the signal is distorted and how it changes. And then they do the same thing with a digital signal alien, which is laid over a grid.

So all of the lines are very straight at right angles. And the drawings quantized kind of just like the digital signal, so it has to be on the line. And they can see that the transmission of that signal is a lot easier and with less noise and distortion. So they see the advantage of digital signals. Yes, that's what we would like them to see. Do they see anything useful about analog signals doing this? There's also another kind of claim evidence response activity where they get to think about if there was an endangered bird song that wanted to be recorded, would they choose analog or digital?

So there's really no wrong answer for that, but they need to give me the evidence or give the teacher the evidence to prove that maybe analog is better in this situation because it has to do with sound recordings and you want to maintain the integrity of the recording for the endangered bird. You know, as someone who's been doing this for decades, going through the digital age and starting with the analog age, I'm still mystified by the beauty of an analog signal, the waveforms, that kind of thing. Do they understand that also? Do they see that? We do a little bit of waves for, they look a little bit at the digital analog waves, but they don't really do, there's not a lot of sound integration in that. Yeah, Ariel, what are some of the other things, other kinds of things teachers put together

this year? Are students really going to make a sauropod poop in the classroom? Oh, yes. That was one where I, you know, we sort of lean back. Nick Van Acker, he's an educator out at, at Lansing, Michigan at the Michigan State University Museum. And he said, no, no, no, we really can. We can simulate the entire sauropod digestive tract.

And students are going to use evidence from a variety of existing vertebrates to try to form a hypothesis for how that digestive tract. system is going to work and then they're going to do it and you know and I said oh no that's way too gross nobody will ever do it and he's like no I've just done it and you know we all of our educators test their materials with students before we publish so all of them are vetted and he vetted it and he said you know the only technical difficulty we had is making sure that we allowed for outgassing of some of these bags that had a simulated digestion going on inside of them so so yes

that's one example some of them are trend much more pragmatic in this idea of okay, well, let's give students real climate projecting data from multiple federal agencies and ask them to establish where they would want their house to live. Okay, so Peter Nutson created this resource and he's really having students go through authentic data to try to make predictions about where a mortgage would be responsible after climate change has had its way with coastlines, severe weather, drought, et cetera. So, you know, it's all or nothing. All of these teachers use authentic experiences.

all of them are using really robust modeling in their resources. All of them are NGSS aligned. And one of the things I loved about Andrea's resource is a great example. They're all easy to implement and low cost to implement. So her resource, Andrea, you didn't use a whole lot of computers or expensive analog digital signal recording equipment. You used paper. It was a fully offline activity. That was totally rad.

I wanted to make it accessible for everyone. And in fact, these resources that you're making are free educators who want to. to use them, right, Ariel? That's right. They're all free to access on science ready.com slash educate. And that's true of all of our educational resources. They're also low cost to implement, and they're designed to be super adaptable and adaptable. So these teachers have thought really hard about what educators look for when they're adopting

a resource, and they've made sure that they're going to be easy to understand and easy to implement. Andrea, tell us what a day in your classroom looks like. So I think it's a lot different than what most people may be experienced when they were in school. There's not a lot of lecture anymore. I don't do a lot of notes. It's really about the students and the students learning through activities and learning from each other and figuring out how these processes work on their own. So I do a lot of projects in my classroom and a lot of activities where the kids are playing with stuff.

Yesterday was our first day and I had them just play around with these little fortune fish and they got to do many experiments and it just got them thinking. And that's really what I want in my classroom. I want my students engaged in an activity and thinking about the science behind it. What if a student isn't engaged? Are there tools, techniques that you can use? I have a specific student who I really, I had him for two years in a row, and it was a struggle for this student to get engaged into science.

And at the beginning of the last school year, I told my students, let's get a classroom pet. It has to be low maintenance. I don't want it to smell. It's got to be really easy to take care of. And so they all came up with ideas. And this one student came to me. He ran to me before school even started, and he said, Miss La Rosa, I think we should get an axolado.

I think that would be a great classroom pet. And I had one of these as a teenager, and it is really easy. And I said, you know what, that is an excellent idea. That's the one we're going to get. And after that, he got really engaged into science, mostly for the axolado, but it also was just something that he owned. And it was, he took ownership of his learning in the classroom for that. But he couldn't do that without you. No, I'm serious.

I always believe, and I had an eighth grade, Mrs. Feffer kept me interested in science, but it was the teacher who took care of the student and stayed with the students. And they, I think, as a student, I understood that, and I tried a little harder for that reason. Yeah. Do you think, yeah, it's the same thing as being on a baseball football team, the coach? Yeah, I want my students to be, I want them to be excited. And we have a lot of people who tweeted us about their favorite. adventures in school with their teachers. James Andrus writes,

in high school, my physics teacher had us make roller coasters out of cardboard and tape. It had to have one loop, two hills, and an 180 degree turn, then stop. We had to do all of the math so that it could be built in a real-world scenario. That's a nice project. That's great. That's outstanding. Yeah. What subjects to your students seem to gravitate to the most, Andrea?

Again, I think it's anything where they get to play. We're starting with our first unit is physics, and we're going to be playing with rockets, and we're going to be playing tug-of-war. And they're still kids. They're 13-year-old. So they want to play and learn just as much as any other child. And I think that's what they gravitate to when they get to be active and they get to be part of the process. I heard that you wanted to start a coding club as a result of participating in the SciFRI Educator Collaborative.

That's an extra bonus to the program. So after doing this coding activity and the technology, you know, it really is a topic that we need to prepare our students for, especially our female students. So I am starting a Girls Who Code Club this year at West Side. I'm really excited about it. And Ariel, I'm kind of jealous of the kids who get to do these experiments and activities. Oh, me too. I was once one of those kids. It's a long time since I was in junior high school. But are there any classic experiments that we did that are being taught anymore?

Oh, boy. There are a number of them. And I, you know, I think that's what's been so fun about working with teachers in now, right? Is that teachers today do come with a critical lens to ask whether some of those sacred cow experiments that we've carried over through the generations are worth it. And they may not be worth it for a number of reasons. One, because they're passive. So an example are these, you know, whizbang demos, which can be fun for a moment, but they are not enough, you know, having something explode or having a volcano, you know, with baking soda erupt, they might look cool, but maybe nobody learns anything. There aren't ways to test hypotheses with that. There aren't ways to collect data with that. And so, you know, I think as we've seen some of those get retired,

it leaves this gap in curriculum that innovative teachers are now filling, right? So they're working on making sure that we're practicing engineering skills, that we're practicing scientific process skills as we're doing those experiments. And that is, you know, that's a win, right? So the volcano is my favorite one to get on the case about, just because there's so many cooler ways to model lava and model pressure and volcanoes. You don't have to do it like that. But loads other, we've heard about this chemistry rainbow experiment that should be outlawed, right?

Because it's this idea that you pour essentially pour an accelerant on a bunch of small flames with different colored salts and make a rainbow of flames. We know this is incredibly dangerous besides not really teaching anyone anything. And so, you know, we've transitioned to safer versions of that experiment where students can explore through inquiry. They're not just watching a stage on the stage. They're really thinking for themselves and driving that experimental process themselves. I got a tweet from Live who says, I almost switched majors due to Dr. Pigler at UIW. He was so passionate and fun and made all the difference.

You know that? And I have other tweets coming in. I had two professors in college who just took us into the woods, told us the name of things, and now I have a Ph.D. in plant biology. Oh, wow. I mean, Andrea is teaching different. teaching science different than it was when you were in grade school?

I think the enthusiasm of the teacher hasn't changed. And just like the people who have written in, I'm here because I had a great AP bio teacher and great college professors who were enthusiastic about science and about learning. And I think that hasn't changed about science education, but a lot of the other mechanics have a little bit. Do you think it's harder to teach the concepts students are required to learn now? Ariel? That's an interesting question.

And I, you know, it kind of goes back to this issue even of technology and how science is advancing really quickly. Science is advancing faster than it ever has before. And so the notion that, oh, we're going to have to keep up and teach more and teach harder is, is kind of misguided. I think is, as we discussed, right, like it's a, it's not about teaching them content. It's about teaching them how to think about information, how to process information, and how to how to go through this process of collect.

evidence to justify a theory and idea, hypothesis. And so what we're seeing change and what's really exciting about teaching right now is it's this it's this totally different approach. It's let's teach them how to think, not teach them what to know about. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking about teaching science and this is Science Friday's Educator Collaborative we're talking about. Here's a really interesting tweet that you're talking about.

a tweet that came in. I had a chemistry teacher in grade nine that made a super saturated solution of copper sulfate and then dropped a tiny crystal of same in and it all came out into one big blue crystal before our eyes. It helped solidify my interest in material science. I almost cried. Oh, beautiful. And with a good pun hidden in there. That's outstanding. So I think these experiences, I hope that every student leaves their K-12 experience with those types of experiences. And so, you know, and I can't reiterate this enough either. This cohort that we have of educators is made up of classroom teachers, but also informal museum educators, government agency educators, camp instructors. All these people are creative professionals who,

their whole purpose, their thing they get out of bed in the morning for is to encourage people to have those experiences, to get really excited about science. And so go meet an educator and talk to them, because they probably have some really cool thing they can share with you right now. Are you excited about going back to school? I am really excited. Why? One of my students asked me yesterday

on the first day of school after our routines. He said, Ms. La Rosa, I do have a question. What are you most excited to teach us this year? And that made me cry a little bit. But it made me think about what that actually means. And I think if they're excited and they're, you know, involved in their own learning and choosing their own adventure of what they want their education to be.

be, then that's what's exciting for me. And every year you get new students, and it is pretty exciting. Well, that's about all the time we have today. It's great. I want to welcome, you know, everybody who's going to join the collaborative. Ariel, how do we get involved in this if we want to join the collaborative? Well, applications open just after your Thanksgiving turkey. So check us back in November.

In the meantime, you can stay in touch at sciencefrily.com slash educate. Sign up for our newsletter, see the resources that come out, and that's where we'll post that application when it opens for in the fall. I want to thank my guest, Ariel Zitch, who's education director for Science Friday, Andrea La Rosa, science teacher at the Westside Middle School Academy in Danbury, Connecticut, and a member of this year's Science Friday Educator Collaborative. Thank you. Thank you both for your work. And you can see all of this year's classroom resources publishing throughout the fall right there on our website at ScienceFriday.com slash educate. Quick program note, we want to, we want to hear your voice as

say every week on Science Friday. We have a new app to help us do that. It's called Science Friday Vox Pop. Science Friday Vox Pop lets you easily record, share your voice, comments with us. We might even play them on the radio. We're working on a segment for next week's show about football and helmets and concussions, and we want to know from you, do you think football leagues are doing enough to protect players' brains? Do you think football leagues are doing enough to protect players' brains? So tell us, download the Science Friday Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps. And we would like to hear from you on, put you possibly on the radio. We want to say hi to us?

Yes, you can. On social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Every day now is Science Friday. You can also email us SciFri at ScienceFri.com. Send your feedback. We'd love to hear from you. Have a great and safe holiday weekend in Fairfield, Connecticut. I'm Ira Flato.