Science Friday - World Space Week And Promising Climate Tech Companies

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

It’s World Space Week, and we’re fueling up the rocket for a tour of some missions and projects that could provide insights into major space mysteries. Astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi joins Host Flora Lichtman to celebrate the wonders of space science, from the recently launched IMAP, which will study the solar environment, to the new Vera Rubin Observatory, and big physics projects like LIGO. Plus, the latest in climate tech: MIT Technology Review has published its annual list of climate tech companies that show great promise in work ranging from producing sodium ion batteries to recycling rare earth magnets. Host Ira Flatow talks with climate reporter Casey Crownhart about trends in climate tech and what companies she’s excited about.Guests: Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi is an astrophysicist and author of the upcoming book, Why Do We Exist? The Nine Realms of the Universe That Make You Possible, and host of the video podcast “Particles of Thought.”Casey Crownhart is a senior climate reporter for MIT Technology Review based in New York City.Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey, I'm Florida Lichtenen, and you're listening to Science Friday. Today in the podcast, we are leaving planet Earth to wrestle with some of the big mysteries of space. You got to get deep into these things. You have to contemplate them. And as I'm sitting here, living in the cosmological realm for weeks, you know, my mind is in that space. I understand how people go mad. Strapping. Happy World Space Week to those who celebrate. We have been going hard, obviously.

And to cap off the week, we are leaving the planet behind for a moment. Why not? Here to space out with us is astrophysicist Hakeem Olushei. He's the author of the upcoming book, Why Do We Exist, The Nine Realms of the Universe, that make you possible. And the host of the video podcast, Particles of Thought. Hekeem, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. I am a huge fan.

We are honored. Okay. So as we know, space is big. There is no shortage of news, but you flagged a couple new missions that you think should be on our radar, including IMAP. What is that? Yeah. So, IMAP is a mission that is going to study how our sun protects us from the dangerous radiation of intergalactic space. So our sun has this phenomenon known as the solar wind.

It's blowing all the time at a million miles per hour. And it creates this bubble of. magnetic field that kind of acts like a cosmic shield for us. So IMAP is going to study both how the sun accelerates those particles to form the wind, but also the stuff that is entering our magnetic bubble, our shield, and coming into the inner solar system. So it's going to actually sample the local interstellar medium. I didn't realize that the sun was actually protecting us, because I feel like when I hear about the sun and solar wind and space weather, it's like it's all coming at us from the sun, but you're saying it protects us too?

Yeah, absolutely. So both are occurring, right? We live inside the Earth's magnetic bubble that we call our magnetosphere, and the sun has a bigger magnetic bubble that encloses the entire solar system called the heliosphere. And the radiation that's coming from the sun is primarily just hydrogen nuclei, protons, right? They're dangerous, but what's coming from the galaxy is the stuff that's spewing out of black holes coming from exploding stars. So it's way more dangerous, and the sun is our protector. So we need a protector from our protector. Okay. That's interesting. Okay, so how does this mission work with the Parker Solar Probe, which we've covered on the show, and we know made history recently with sort of the closest flyby?

Is it going to upstage the Parker Solar Probe? They're going to work in sync. So, you know, NASA has a fleet of heliophysics satellites that monitor the sun from various locations, right, in the solar system. There are the solar dynamics observed. The observatory, the stereo mission, Parker, IMAP. And so together, they can sample what's happening where they are located, right? The actual solar wind itself, the magnetic fields that are in it, the particles that are in it. They can look back at Earth, if need be. And they can measure the stuff coming into our solar system from elsewhere.

So it's almost like having several eyes looking at in multiple different directions and protecting the Earth altogether, right? space weather is a thing as much as, you know, Earth's surface weather. You know, one of the big mysteries we've talked about on Science Friday for many years is this niggling little question of what 95% of the universe is made of, this mystery of dark matter and dark energy. Yes. Have we made any progress there? Oh, man.

You know, there's progress and there's progress. So the progress is that we've eliminated everything we thought we knew. We think it's this. And then you do studies or you look for it and you find out, well, it looks like it's not that after all. So dark matter and dark energy remain huge problems, right? But we have these new missions that are going to give us more information, more data. One is the Vera Rubin telescope. I was a member of the early development team for it.

It just got first light this summer. There's the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope that's coming up. You know, so what they're going to do is they're going to map out dark matter, which you can see through its gravitational effects, and it's going to look at the expansion rate of the universe over time to an incredibly high precision. Again, maybe not know exactly what dark energy is, but we can know what dark energy is not. Are we getting into the Hubble crisis here? Oh, yeah. So currently, you know, we can measure the expansion rate of the universe nearby, and both in space and time. and we can measure the expansion rate of the universe at a time 13.5 billion years ago.

And the problem is they don't agree. And the more precisely we make the measurements, the disagreement only groves, right? So this is a real crisis. And so with Rubin and with Nancy Grace Roman, hopefully we can go into that region where we currently don't have a lot of good data. And that, you know, we don't know what the universe was doing. in that period. And there was recent evidence from an experiment called DESE that dark energy is getting weaker, right? It was thought to be a constant force in the universe. Now we're finding it may vary with time.

So, you know, scientists get excited when there's something that we don't know. And this is squarely in that category. Yes, we have talked to many astrophysicists on the show that are like, it's an amazing time to be alive. It is. It is. Because, you know, you can ask these questions. But, you know, at the same time, you're kind of like, man, I wish I was alive 100 years from now. So you could have some answers, you mean? Exactly. You know, I was talking to one of the discoveries of dark energy on the podcast last week, Adam Reese who won the Nobel Prize for it. And I asked him, I said, hey, man, you know, I worked in this area myself at the turn of the century. And I was like, did you think

it would take us this long to figure this out? You know, we thought that we would know by this time. Yeah. What did he say? You know, what he said was, man, I didn't even believe it when I discovered it. So let alone getting to the point of thinking we're going to discover what it is, I wasn't even sure it was real. And he went on to say that it wasn't until I was actually at the Nobel Prize ceremony that I thought to myself, okay, maybe this is real. That's amazing.

Okay, more small questions for you. The name of your book is Why Do We Exist? Yes. Why do we exist? Because, you know, we are incredibly lucky. You know, I talk about the nine realms of the universe that make us possible. And, you know, if you take away any of those nine realms, like one of the realms is the dark realm, dark matter and dark energy, right?

Without dark matter, we don't have galaxies for me, right? Without galaxies, we don't have star systems. And without star systems, we don't have planets, right? So there are so many layered elements to our existence from the cosmological realm of the very large, to the quantum realm of the very small, to the realm of life that really, you know, does this thing with energy that seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics, right?

You know, it creates order. You know, life creates order, creates higher complexity, and takes advantage of these energy gradients to sustain itself. And this is, you know, when you really get an understanding of how unlikely our existence is, And I don't mean the existence of life itself, right? I do a calculation in my book of how many worlds should exist in our galaxy with large life forms like ourselves. And, you know, it's like one out of a million star systems.

But when you look at how many bodies should have life like we perhaps just discovered on Mars with this new data, you know, small bacteria, archaea, viruses, things like that, it could be in the billions, if not hundreds of billions. Right? So this universe is hostile to life and throughout the majority of its volume. Yet here we are. Right? Here we are. It seems like an impossible inevitability. It's both impossible and inevitable. And here we are. I have goosebumps. I mean, these are deep thoughts. Do they creep into your daily life? Oh, my goodness. You know, when you get trained in physics, you just don't see the world in the same way anymore. And I'm telling you, when I was writing this book, you got to get deep into these things. You have to contemplate them. And as I'm sitting here, living in the cosmological realm for weeks, you know, my mind is in that space.

I understand how people go mad. Yes. Totally. Yeah. How did you get into this field, Hakeem? Oh, it started when I was 10 years old. I was always interested in nature. And when I was a 10-year-old, you know, I was an avid reader as.

a child back when books were a thing right and i decided i was going to read my family's set of encyclopedias from a to z and i got to e and i encountered albert einstein and i encountered relativity and i always loved things that were weird and magical and that's exactly what einstein and relativity are so i became instantly obsessed so fast forward to 17 i'm winning first place in the state science fair in Mississippi for writing a program that calculated all the effects of relativity. Right. You know?

Wow. Okay. You were committed. I was committed. I was obsessed. You know, that's the thing, right? Obsession can kind of look like discipline or commitment. But it's really just, you know, I can't take my mind off of this.

I just want to understand the nature of reality as it exists. And because it's so non-intuitive, you know, you can't just, you can't be an armchair quarterback and figure out how the universe works. It requires rigorous math, rigorous observations, rigorous experiments. And I realize that the way to get to deeper truth was to learn that scientific rigor. And then when I discovered was, you know, we've learned so much to this point. Maybe we can ask crazy questions like why do we exist that sound non-scientific. But our data has taken us so far that, you know, we're starting to get an inkling to the answers to some of these questions.

I love that. ahead, is there one of these missions or projects that you are looking forward to that really keeps you on the edge of your seat? Well, you know, I love the study of Spacetime itself. And there's these two sets of experiments that will give us some deeper insights. One already has. And these are these gravitational wave observatories like LIGO and Virgo. But another, which is also equally spectacular, is the Event Horizon Telescope that's imaging black holes at the cores of of galaxies, our own and nearby ones like M87. You know, this is where spacetime takes on its most extreme behaviors.

And so by studying nature at the extremes, we can learn more about the general, the mundane, and what's global. You know, space time eludes us. That's why we, you know, we're weirded out by dark matter and dark energy because essentially it's a space time effect. That's the stuff I'm looking forward to. What new insights are they going to give us about? about the nature of reality.

And then how do we take advantage of it with the technologies we're going to develop in the future? I can't wait. Astrophysicist Hakeem Olusheye, his upcoming book, Why Do We Exist, The Nine Realms of the Universe that Make You Possible, Comes to Shelf's the Spring.

Hakeem also hosts the video podcast, Particles of Thought, and you can find it on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks, Hakeem. Thank you so much. And if you're looking for more space travel, side fries down to Earth has you covered,

join in on a cosmic mission to tackle climate change in your own backyard. No space suit required. Check out all the activities at ScienceFriday.com slash down to Earth. Coming up after the break, Ira takes a look at some of the trends and innovations happening in climate tech. Stick around. For better or worse, it's been a big year for climate tech. The Trump administration has slashed billions of dollars in funding for clean energy projects. On the other hand, other countries,

are ramping up their climate initiatives. The magazine MIT Technology Review recently published a list of climate tech companies to watch. They're ones that aren't just doing something innovative, but show real promise in driving down greenhouse gas emissions. Here to discuss the trends and inventions happening in climate tech as MIT Technology Review, senior climate reporter Casey Crownheart. Casey, welcome back. Thanks so much for having me.

Okay, you've worked on this. list of climate companies to watch for what, three years now? How did you decide? How did you decide what companies made it into the list? Yeah, this is our third year putting this list together. And it's always a really kind of interesting exercise. You know, we try to zoom out a little bit, think about what industries show promise, what countries, what geographies are going to be important in the coming year and years to come, you know, within that, what businesses are showing progress, you know, building pilot plants or raising a lot of money or showing new results that indicate that they could really help reduce greenhouse gas emissions or help us deal with

climate change in the future. Did the cuts to climate funding here in the U.S. affect your choices? Absolutely. This year, we actually reduced the number of companies on our list. So in past years, we've recognized 15 and just kind of, you know, in observance of what's going on in climate tech, we decided to scale back a little bit this year. So we have 10 companies on our list. We also kind of have an even more international list this year. In the past, it's kind of been a worldwide range of companies. But this year we really focused on looking to Europe, looking to China, these other markets while the U.S. is kind of seeing this, maybe a little bit of a slowdown. Well, it's a little bit more than a little slowdown, is it not? I mean, there are all kinds of

things going on, all kinds of cuts. Yeah, I'm trying to be a little bit positive. But no, absolutely, like you mentioned at the top, you know, last week there were announcements that the Department of Energy is terminating, you know, hundreds of grants worth over $7 billion for clean energy. And that's just a continuation of a trend in the U.S. We're still seeing, you know, private investment isn't kind of as dramatic of a story. The first half of this year, climate tech private investment is holding steady. So globally, you know, it's not too terrible of a story. But yeah, definitely public funding in the U.S. is a huge turnaround from this time last year. And I think the one country we're seeing a huge turnaround in is China, right? China is absolutely the global leader in clean energy tech. And we definitely recognize that as we were putting the list together, you know, whether it's batteries, solar and wind, everything. But, you know, it's really not a turnaround, I would say. It's, You know, this country has been for, you know, nearly two decades been slowly and surely

building these industries up through really longstanding public support. Yeah, I guess what I meant by turnaround is they're like the world's biggest fossil fuel emitted. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that's true. And to be fair, China does still get a really big portion of its electricity from coal, but you're seeing that a lot of the growth is absolutely coming from renewable. So, yeah, that's really fair to say.

And why is that so successful? What makes their clean energy projects, you know, stand out? I think that a lot of it comes from that foundation of just, you know, China in the 2000 saw that, you know, okay, everybody else has an auto industry. And as we build ours up, we're going to try to focus on something different. And so I think by, you know, giving a lot of subsidies, really focusing policy support for all of these technologies, China has been able to scale these industries. And so it's easier to build solar panels if you've built millions and millions of them before. So I think that it just comes down to some extent to an extended kind of deliberate effort to scale up these industries. And now they can make very, very cheap products.

Yeah, let's talk about some of these companies on your list, specifically in China. A company in Beijing is scaling up sodium. ion batteries. Is sodium ion a game changer? I'm really interested in sodium ion batteries, and I've been following them for a while. So yeah, this company that we highlighted, Hina battery technology, they're a startup company making sodium ion cells. This tech could be less expensive than lithium ion batteries, just based on the materials. Sodium is much more abundant. And so we're really interested to see what this company can do. They already have batteries, in sort of stationary storage plants on the grid, so to kind of, you know, help store renewable

power. And they also have their batteries in electric scooters already. So we're really interested to see what happens with them. But they're also not the only one doing sodium ion batteries. You know, the big companies in China, CATL, BYD also have really significant support behind this technology, too. And the competitive advantage, they have sodium ion over lithium? It's interesting because this is another example of battery technology where a lot of the kind of tech, a lot of the ideas were invented in the U.S. And there are some U.S. companies building sodium ion batteries as well. But there was actually one big high profile one that shut down just recently. So again, I think that some people thought that sodium ion could be a way that the U.S. kind of snuck in and kind of was more competitive with China on batteries.

but we're really seeing so far China has no indications that China is slowing down. Yeah, and they could actually make an impact on the climate. Absolutely. I mean, I think transportation is one of the biggest, you know, sectors in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and the grid. So if you're able to, you know, I think that batteries are like basically a master key for the energy transition, just why I'm always yapping about them. But yeah, if you can make a dent on transportation and on the energy transition, you're going to, the energy sector. That's two really big ones right there. You know, what we also notice is that the AI data centers are taking up a huge amount of energy. And even the data center builders are trying to

think of new ways to come up with how they might get that energy. What's going on here? Yeah, you're super on it on that. That trend is one we noticed as well. And so there's a ton of talk around how much energy we're going to need to power these massive data centers. And so we noticed that in the U.S., you know, some of these companies that are maybe going to be able to help with that in the future. So nuclear, we notice chiros power building these kind of alternative next generation nuclear plants. Fervo energy is a geothermal company that was kind of trying to do the same thing. If companies are able to kind of take advantage of all of this money and interest and excitement, that that could be kind of one way that people can win in this really

tough climate tech environment in the U.S. Are there actually new nuclear power designs and companies that are that are taking advantage of them? Yeah, I mean, so Kyros, one of the companies on our list, they recently signed a deal to basically supply energy to Google for their data centers. And so there are designs. I think one of the biggest questions when you hear about nuclear and data centers is the timeline, because you know, you can build a data center fairly.

quickly. New nuclear power takes a very long time to permit and to build and to start up. So that's kind of one caveat that I'll say is that it's exciting to see, you know, some of this money and interest go towards these companies, but it's going to take a long time for that to actually execute and make a dent in this energy demand. Did you notice any other themes as you put together this list? Absolutely. I think another one that we really noticed is that kind of critical minerals and materials is really an interesting area and one that I think you could see some positive moves in the U.S. So we highlighted one company called cyclic materials. They are trying to recycle rare earth magnets. So these are magnets that are in everything from

speakers to EV motors and wind turbines and smartphones. And there's this concern that all of those materials are today processed in China, basically. And so this company is one of a growing industry that's trying to reclaim those rare earth magnets, recycle them, and be able to use that material again. Give me a quick 101 about what are these materials and why are they so important to recycle? Rare earth magnets are powerful magnets. So they're much more powerful than the iron-based magnets you might find on your fridge. And they're really the basis for a lot of electronics today. and they require some materials like neodymium that can be kind of concentrated, you know, on the planet. These aren't just, you don't just find them everywhere.

They're not really all that rare, but they can be a little bit tough to refine. And so it's become this really interesting field where people are saying, you know, we have all of these magnets and your old iPhone that is sitting in a drawer somewhere or, you know, these EVs that are starting to come off the road. And so it would use a lot less water. It would produce a lot less greenhouse gas emissions to, you know, reclaim those. You basically grind them up, put them through this chemical process, and you can, you know, reclaim those materials rather than having to go mine them again, refine them again, and so on. Yeah, because so little of it gets recycled now, right? Very, very little. Globally, only about 0.2% of rare earths are recycled from used devices. All right. Last question for you, Casey. Let's look ahead, even amidst all these cuts to climate funding here in the U.S. Is there a technology that you're hoping has, for lack of a better word, a breakthrough in the coming year? Oh, that's a really tough one. I'm really excited about the electric vehicle companies that we included on this list.

So Trayton in Europe is really working on getting electric trucks on the road. And I think that that could be a real breakthrough if we can continue to get, you know, more of our road transport electrified, keep building out the charging infrastructure to be able to charge these vehicles quickly. That's another one that I'm really excited to see if they can have kind of this commercial or uptake breakthrough. And the Chinese, other companies are making some incredible electric vehicles. but I don't see the Trump administration allowing any of them to get here. Yeah, it's really interesting. And everybody who goes to China or gets to see these vehicles says, you know,

it's night and day that the technology that's in those cars, how cheap they're starting to become. Absolutely. I don't see anybody kind of catching up to China's lead anytime soon. Well, I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much for having me. Always so much fun. It's always good to have you, Casey.

Casey Crownhart, Senior Climate Reporter for MIT Technology Review. If you like the show, rate and review us wherever you listen, or just go straight to guerrilla marketing. Take a friend's phone and subscribe them to this podcast. Please help us get the word out about Science Friday. Today's episode was produced by Charles Berkwist and Rasha Airedi. But a lot of folks helped make this show happen every single week, including Annie Nero. Rosen Rosenberg. John Dankowski.

Danielle Johnson. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.