Science Friday - Youth Climate Protest, Science Talent Search Winners, Snowflake Changes. March 15, 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: March 15, 2019

It all started with 16-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg. Last August, Thunberg started skipping school on Fridays to protest outside Sweden’s parliament, insisting her country get behind the Paris Climate Agreement. Her protests have inspired thousands of young people around the world to join the #FridaysForFuture movement, skipping school to demand that their governments take action against climate change. And on Friday March 15th, these young people will take things a step further—joining together across more than 90 countries and 1,200 cities in the Youth Climate Strike. Sarah Kaplan, science reporter for the Washington Post, reports live from the scene of one of those stikes in Manhattan’s Columbus Circle. Plus, Ira speaks with Isabella Fallahi, Youth Climate Strike organizer and Varshini Prakash, executive director and co-founder of the Sunrise Movement about what’s inspiring this current moment of youth-led activism. Each year, approximately 1,800 high school science students take part in the Regeneron Science Talent Search (Regeneron STS), a program of Society for Science & the Public. This year’s projects ranged from studying the viscosity of molten lava to investigating more fuel efficient airplane designs to creating a computer model to predict refugee migrations. Senior Samuel Weissman analyzed the genetic makeup of two HIV patients, and senior Ana Humphrey created a math model to look for exoplanets. Ira talks with them about their winning projects. As we can all attest, climate change is creating more fluctuating temperatures. Normally, snowflakes form high up in the atmosphere, and crystallize into their pretty structures as they pass through cold layers of air. But with warmer temperatures, snowflakes can partially melt on their way down. There’s more water in the air these days, and it acts like a glue that can glom onto the snowflakes, covering them with little ice pellets. Add in the wind and the snowflakes can smash together, turning into mega snowflakes. To add insult to injury, after these snowflakes land they melt faster because they’re less able to reflect light. This has serious implications for flooding and hydrology as well as spring vegetation. When melting occurs normally, the nutrients in the snowpack are absorbed into the soil. Not so when it melts away really fast.     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. Later in the hour, we'll talk with some standout teens from this year as Regener on Science Talent Search. But first, this week's air safety regulators around the world grounded Boeing's 737 max eight jets in the wake of a deadly crash in Ethiopia. The cause of that crash is still unknown. But the behavior of the aircraft in its final minutes was strikingly similar to that of another 737 max, which crashed last October in Indonesia. Maggie Kerth Baker, a senior science reporter at 538, is with me to talk about that and other selected subjects in science this week.

Welcome back, Maggie. Hi, thanks for having me. You're welcome. So, Phyllis, what do investigators now know so far about this most recent crash? Well, we know one thing that it's definitely a big deal to have two crashes of the same type of plane in close succession, you know, just two years after the model first flew. So to give you some context on that, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which first flew in 2009, has never had a fatality, which is what's drawing a lot of attention to this 737 max. You know, it matters a lot that it's crashed twice in such close timing.

And is this a problem with the plane or how it's being flown? So based on what we know about that Indonesia accident, it sounds like it might be a little bit of both, kind of a change. chain reaction of problems. So the 737 max was a redesign of an older airplane that was intended to be more fuel efficient. And part of how they did that was getting these different engines, which were a little bit bigger, so the designers put them further forward on the wing. And that has a tendency to destabilize the aircraft in certain situations. So then Boeing has this plane preloaded with software that automatically corrects the plane's pitch when it needs to. But data from this previous crash last year suggests that sensors that tell the plane when it needs to turn that correction on could

be malfunctioning. And the ways that pilots are supposed to interact with that particular bit of autopiloting, it turns out to be pretty counterintuitive to the ways they're used to flying. So you have this kind of perfect storm of problems and solutions and kind of everything sort of cluedged together in a way that just makes accidents more likely, maybe. So if the crashes are due to basically a software problem, how long might it be? take to fix it? That I don't know the answer to. I think it's interesting. One of the things I've been paying attention to with this, though, is the way that it's sort of tied into these bigger theories about sort of how disasters happen, that sociologists have been looking at this idea

called normal accidents for around 40 years, where you kind of have these complex systems that then we try to make simpler and we try to solve the problems that these complex systems create and end up creating new problems that we didn't even think could happen. Unexpected consequences. All right, let's move on to other news this week. Calls for a five-year moratorium on a certain kind of gene editing. Tell us about what's going on there. Yeah, so 18 scientists, including two of the pioneer developers of the CRISPR gene editing technology,

they published a statement this week calling for a five-year moratorium on using any gene editing to alter human sperm, eggs, and embryos. And obviously that's part of a reaction to that work of the Chinese scientist Hege Yan Kui, who announced back in December that he'd been doing these secret experiments and had produced genetically edited babies. But there's been some pushback to this. And what's interesting about it is that the pushback is sort of based around the idea that, you know, first off, this is a completely unenforceable mandate. You know, there's no central office of international science that can tell government. what to do. And it's all kind of creating sort of a voluntary sign-on thing that then governments

would have to pass laws about. And second, a lot of governments already have laws on the books about this. So you have the whole situation in China, the Chinese government had already advised against it. So anything like this wouldn't really stop someone else from doing the same kind of work that He was doing. You know, this reminds me of the Isilimar conference back in 1975 where genetic engineering had just been born and the scientists were fearful it might something might crawl out and they stopped their research to talk about it just like this conference it seems. But nothing, you know, and it was a voluntary thing also.

Right, exactly. And one of the things that it sort of ends up coming down to is that, you know, we have all these different structures for regulating science on the international level. We have local laws. We have the power of financing. But a lot of the times what it comes down to is whether scientists can convince other scientists that something is wrong and that they should feel bad about doing it. Peer pressure, essentially. Yeah, I get it. It's true.

Let's move way back into time where there is research out this week about an ancient solar storm. Yeah, new evidence. Tell us. That suggests a massive wave of radiation from the sun crashed into the earth around 660 BC. It would be one of the strongest solar storms we've. ever found evidence of. So these are things that happen periodically. They're just natural processes associated with shifting magnetic field on the sun. You can kind of think of it as like a sun burp. And when they happen, you get these waves of charged particles that hurtle through space, and

sometimes they have enough energy behind them that they can get through the Earth's own magnetic field. So that can be a big deal to us here now because these waves of solar radiation, they can damage satellites. They're dangerous for astronauts. They can even mess with technological infrastructure here on the ground. And we don't know how common they are. So scientists are looking for evidence in ice cores in this case, also in tree rings of these older solar storms that happen so we can get a better idea of how common this is and how much we need to worry. Finally, I want to get into a topic that's closer to home. And I'm talking about really closer toilet paper. I've read this for the soft.

Versions of toilet paper are destroying forests in Canada? Yes. Yes. Your delicate rear end is responsible for natural degradation all over the world. The National Resources Defense Council had released a paper this week that found that the U.S. uses more toilet paper per capita than any other country. So 4% of the world's population, and we account for 20% of toilet paper consumption. And most of that is virgin paper, not recycled, which means this huge impact on forests. But then you have the whole deal where recycled toilet paper is not the soft, cushy, comfy stuff.

So it's really hard to convince consumers that that's what they want. You've kind of got this conflict there between, I guess, supply and demand. Certainly there's a bacteria or a yeast somewhere that could chew it up a little better. and use the recycled stuff, you know. Thank you, thank you, Maggie. Maggie Kurt Baker, Senior Science Reporter for a 538. Now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO, St. Louis Public Radio News.

Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. Well, it may feel like spring in some parts of the country, but some scientists are still, well, they still have snow on the brain. And it turns out that besides shaking up when it, and where it snows, climate change is also messing with the shapes of our snowflakes. And one local citizen science project is asking you to help document the process. Here with more about why climate change makes for weird snowflakes.

WNYC reporter in New York here, designer and designer, Clarissa Diaz. Hi, Clarissa. Hi, Clarissa. Hi, thanks for having me. Tell us about this. I get that climate change would affect when it snows and where, but we're talking about the snowflakes themselves being misshapen. Yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, I think as we can probably feel, climate change is creating these fluctuating temperatures. So, you know, we have cold weather, followed by warm weather, followed by cold weather. It's basically like this yo-yo effect. But so for a snowflake to form, it forms up high up in the atmosphere. And ideally, it needs to pass through consistent layers of cold air in order to fully crystallize. So if you have warmer layers of air in there, basically three things can happen to a snowflake. The first is that a snowflake can only partially form. It basically partially melts because of the warmer air. And this is actually known as rounding. And basically the structure, the intricacy of that snowflake is less defined.

And the second thing that could happen is that because the air is warmer, you actually have more liquid water in the air, right? So you get these droplets of water. And those are actually known as they're called rhyme. And they will actually act like a glue, and they'll stick on to the snowflake. And if you get a covering of rhyme or covering of these droplets, it's known as gropple or soft hail.

So why do these snowflakes need to be studied? What are you going to learn from that? Yeah, so another thing that happens is they kind of smashed together in the wind. So they're less able to reflect light. And the important thing is not only what happens in the atmosphere, but when it actually goes on the ground, it creates this winter snowpack. And if the snowflakes are less able to reflect light,

then that means the snowpack is less able to reflect light, too. so everything just melts faster. And that actually can have implications for, you know, the hydrology of the region. We, you know, the water that goes into streams and reservoirs, as well as the nutrients that that snowpack contains for, that's absorbed usually gradually from the soil by the soil and produces nourishment for spring vegetation. So you want our listeners to pitch in on a project. Tell us about that. Yeah, so we worked with Dr. Marco Tedesco at Columbia University's Earth Institute in his,

in his team. And we basically followed them to understand how they collect data. And we worked with them to create this snow kit that anybody can use to kind of take photographs of snowflakes and see how they're changing and also measure the depth of snow in their local area. Here's Jared Enton manager of Terrestrial Hydrology Program at NASA talking about it. When you think about these, they need a lot of what we call validation. So we need people out there taking all sorts of different observations, what NASA

doing at this point is also trying to move beyond just is snow on the ground or not and start to answer deeper questions like how much water is actually stored in the snowpack. So you want our listeners to actually go out and do this? Yeah, and we actually have the snow kit all designed. What is a snow kit? You get a kit. Yes. And then what do you do? Basically, it has a clip on microscope that clips onto your smartphone and that allows you to take microscopic images of the snowflakes. It's really cool to see that. And then you email them someplace? Yeah. So we have a web that we built with Columbia University where you can get all the resources that you need in order to use the kit and as well as upload data for the scientists.

That's cool. Yeah. Get out there before the snow melts. Get out there while there's still snow, right? And there's actually more in our website. If you want to do this, it sounds cool. ScienceFriety.com slash flakes. ScienceFriety.com slash flakes.

Clarissa, thank you. Thank you. Time to be with us today. Clarissa Diaz, a reporter and designer at WNYC. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, students are protesting government inaction against climate change. It's going on as we speak. We're going to take you there to two locations. We're going to go to Indianapolis and New York City here, so stay with us.

We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. It all started with 16-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg. Last August, Thunberg started skipping school in Fridays to protest outside Sweden's parliament. insisting her country get behind the Paris Climate Agreement. Her protests have inspired thousands of young people around the world to join Fridays for Future. That's a hashtag Fridays for Future movement, skipping school Fridays to demand that their governments take action against climate change.

And today those young people are taking steps, well, a step further, joining together across more than 90 countries, 1,200 cities for a global youth climate strong. It's happening in cities across the world as we speak, including here in New York, where we have our guest, Sarah Kaplan, science reporter for the Washington Post on the scene in Manhattan's Columbus Circle. Hi, Sarah. Hey, Ira. Tell us what the scene is like where you are. How many students are there? What's going on? We could probably hear from the background noise. It is pretty busy. I guess there are about 1,000, if not more, students here. Lots of them have posters. They are chanting. We are the youth, we are the future. We want action on climate change now.

And, yeah, they've been sort of pouring in from all over New York. There were ten protests around the city this morning, and they're kind of coalescing at this rally here at Columbus Circle. How did it get organized? Was it all online and people know to come? Yeah, so a lot of it is online. Here in New York, the protests really started with a young 13-year-old named Alexandria, of the Sino, she has been protesting in front of the United Nations headquarters every Friday,

inspired by Greta Thunberg. And she is part of one of the national leaders of the U.S. Youth Climate Strike Movement. And so, you know, they've been organizing online, but also a lot of it has happened organically. People find out about it because they saw it on Reddit or Twitter or they read a newspaper article, and they're like, well, I want to organize a strike in front of my school or in front of Brooklyn Borough Hall. Do you have any students there we might speak with? Yeah, actually, so Simone is right here. I'm going to give the phone to her.

Hi. Hi there. Welcome to Science Friday. Tell us about why you're there. I'm here because climate change is an issue that's very real. And our elected officials and politicians aren't doing anything about it. And we may not at this age have a chance to put in a ballot or vote, but we see. still have a voice and this is how we're going to use it and get across our message that change is coming, whether they like it or not, like Greta said, and we're ready to take action and do whatever it takes to let our voice be heard and make a difference on the world. Do you have the support of

your teachers or parents in doing this because I understand you're 13? Yeah, so my parents are in full support of this. And some of my teachers are, and one of my teachers, my humanities teacher, actually. He was the one who inspired us to start striking school because he got us into this and was teaching us about Greta and how Alexandria strikes every Friday, and he's in full support of us. Do you think that you can have any real influence on the future of climate change? I think so because every person can make a difference. Every person's voice matters. And if you think that your voice doesn't matter,

then no one's ever going to make a difference and no one's ever going to change. Because if everyone thinks that nothing's ever going to happen and everything adds up, everything makes a difference in the end. And I think that's why this movement has already grown so much. If you look at how many people are even here today and across the world, it's really inspiring. Well, thank you for taking time to talk with us.

And if you give Sarah back the phone, that would be great. Thank you. Hello? Hi, Sarah. Hey, Ira. You know, we can really hear the chanting behind you. It sounds like... Yeah, so they're actually now starting to march through Central Park.

Wow. And she seemed to, you know, the students seem to be very motivated here. They feel like they can make a difference. Yeah, I think that for them, it's... They really feel like this is their future that's malign. The climate change so often for people feels really abstract and in the distance. But, I mean, if you're a fifth grader now, then by the time you graduate college, that's going to be 2030, which is when the UN has said that, you know, we can start the warm, the planet may warm by 1.5 degrees Celsius. and we'll start seeing really dramatic implications of climate change.

So I think it feels probably more visceral and more real to these kids than it does to a lot of adults. Well, Sarah, thank you very much for taking time to head out to New York and to that site, the striking site for a Sarah Kaplan science reporter for the Washington Post. Thanks again. Now we want to turn to another part of the country to Indianapolis, Indiana, where another strike is just wrapping up. And joining me from there is Isabella. Falaahi, student organizer for the Youth Climate Strike.

Isabella, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me. You just wrapped up, right, your youth climate strike there in Indianapolis? How did it go? We just wrapped up. It went great, actually. I think at peak we had everybody around 300 to 400 people from across the state in over 20 different schools. And everyone was super involved and engaged, and we got people signed.

And onto the hashtag join Juliana brief. They got to work with like two or three other organizations and in order to continue their efforts after the day to fight for climate justice. I want to also bring on another guest who's joining us from Boston. Varshini Prakash, co-founder and executive director of the Sunrise Movement. Welcome to Science Friday. Hello, thanks for having me. How does it make you feel when adults, politicians don't seem to take your youth movement?

I mean, seriously. Varshini? Oh, whoop. Sorry, thought you were talking to Isabella there. I'm going to talk to both of you. I wanted to know. Great. Great.

No, I mean, I think what we are seeing right now is an unprecedented call for action globally. I mean, I've just been glued to my computer screen this morning. And we've seen that the politicians, the generations,

the generations before us, have failed the future. They haven't heated the science. They've panes. to oil and gas interests, and they've dragged their feet at the moment when we need courageous leadership the most. And now this movement is emerging to really shock the world into recognizing that we have just 12 years left to take drastic action and that our politicians need to do something about the climate crisis or get out of the way of the new energized leadership that's emerging from the youngest

of the young in this country and around the world. Isabella, do you think that adults are taking you seriously now? I think they're going to start taking us seriously very soon, and if they aren't, then we're just going to keep striking. We're going to keep fighting, and we're going to keep yelling out the injustices that the youth are facing, that our future is facing, and they will take us seriously. I'll promise you that much. How did you get involved in this movement, Isabella? So EISA reached out to me because a lot of us youth activists from across the country were good friends. We have a network.

And so she reached out to me and asked me if I could help lead one in Indiana. So we got the whole process started. We got our permits. We worked with representatives from a bunch of different schools. And that's how it started here in Indianapolis. And what is going to happen after today? Does the movement sort of break up, Isabella? The movement is not breaking up.

I'm telling you that much. If anything, we're more energized and we're ready to keep fighting for climate justice. We're ready to keep demanding the utmost support from our legislators. We are planning an advocacy day coming up here shortly, and part of that is we are trying to get a state legislature to reject a bill HB 1470, in which is going to sort of expand the fossil fuel industry in Indiana

and once again continue to put profit over people. Our number 844724-8255 if you'd like to talk about the students striking today 844724-8255. Varshini students have also brought a lawsuit against the government

over climate change. It's been going working its way through the courts. Is that not correct? That's right, yes. And there are many young people, including Isabella and others, who have been suing the government over their inaction on climate. So we're not just seeing people mobilizing in the streets. We're seeing people use legal courses of action, advocacy lobbying. Young people are really coming to a four in a big way all across the country. Isabella, are you part of the hashtag join Juliana movement too?

Yes. So I am the this is zero hour lead for the hashtag join Juliana campaign. So I still work with Davy Margolyn and Nadia Zahar. However, I do take on most of the reins when it does come to expanding on that. We are working with our Children's Trust. The goal for today was to get strikes and encourage students attending these strikes across the country to sign on to the Antiquist's brief. And I think we've done just that. and afterwards, joint Juliana's got a lot to come,

and we're really just trying to maintain this momentum behind the youth plantis until the June's hearing. And are you surprised by the turnout you had today? I am not surprised by the turnout we had today. The youth are educated on the subject. They're passionate about it, and they understand that our future is a stake. How do you feel when, you know, there have been pictures of the youth, on Capitol Hill and some of the politicians sort of poo-pooing, you know, these little kids are up here. Get them out of our hair, you know?

Not all of them, but some of them. I think that they're just scared. They're scared that they're not going to win their next election because we are speaking truth to power. We are dismantling the system that's in front of us in which prioritizes fossil fuel money over students, over the youth future, and we are quickly exposing that for the world to see, for Americans to see, and for the world to see. I think that's going to stop real quickly, and that's why they're so scared of us. You sound like you're making a pitch as a politician. Do you want to get into politics? Absolutely. I want to obviously go through House of Representatives

and the Senate, but my ultimate goal in my life is aimed for the Oval Office in 24, and I hope that politicians today can start making changes to adjust climate change so that I have the ability to achieve that dream. Do you promise to come on SciFri, Science Friday, back when you get there in 2044? Absolutely. Varsini, the youth-led climate change movement supports the Green New Deal. So if the government were to accept, let's say, the Green New Deal, would that be good enough? No.

The Green New Deal is just a step. Okay, Isabella, go ahead. Sorry. You can go first. No, no, I'm sorry. Go ahead. No, you're good. Yeah, so, I mean, how we understand the Green New Deal is really the Green New Deal is probably

the only solution on the table right now that actually tackles the climate crisis at the scale that is required and mandated by science and that justice demands. It is a 10-year plan to rapidly overhaul every part of our economy and society. at a scale not seen since World War II to eliminate poverty to create tens of millions of good, high-paying jobs for working people and to ensure a just transition for communities

that are on the front lines of poverty and pollution. So it is one of the most comprehensive solutions out there right now and has garnered a lot of support from 2020 hopefuls, from politicians up and down the ballot, and also a wide swath of the population. I'm Ira Plato. This is Science Friday

from WNYC Studios. Let's go to the phones. Let's go to Ryan in Charlotte, North Carolina. Hi, Ryan. Hey, Ira. How are you today? Hey, there. Fine.

Go ahead. So I just wanted to comment on everything that these kids are doing. I myself am 25 years old, and I've been to EPA forums and Clean Air Act in the Charlotte area, as well as Raleigh, North Carolina. Typically, I'm the youngest person that's there, and sometimes I'm one of the only just concerned citizens. So the fact that all of these amazing kids are out there,

they're being courageous, and they're just coming together to really make sure their voices are being heard. It's extremely encouraging and empowering for even people like myself, where, you know, I've kind of felt alone kind of been managing some of these functions, but now I'm feeling even more empowered by these amazing kids because together we all are being heard and we will change the future for the better. Well, thanks for calling. Varshini, why do you think we're seeing this youth movement right now? Why is climate change resonating with that? Right. Well, I mean, I think we're really at a tipping point. As we've said, numerous times the scientists are telling us that time is running out as long as our generation has been alive on this planet. We've seen politicians sort of pussyfooting around the issue and not taking courageous action. And this generation has not experienced a life that isn't full of monster.

hurricanes and apocalyptic fires. And the climate, we are really a climate generation. And we're looking at a future, we're looking at a world with no future, really, and saying enough is enough, what is the point of keeping my mouth shut and staying quiet and in school if we have a planetary emergency on our hands? And so I really think what we're also realizing and what the world is realizing is that we have everything that we need, technological innovation, technological innovation, technology. is not the issue right now.

The science tells us so. Public support is with us. Over 80% of Americans support a Green New Deal, including 64% of Republicans. So right now, the only thing that is lacking is the political will. It's politicians who don't have the moral and courageous leadership in this moment to do the things that are necessary. And that is why we're seeing this uprising of young people around the world.

Isabella, do you agree? I mean, we've seen young people taking the lead in gun control. Now we're seeing it in climate change. Do you feel that young people have to step up now? Yeah, absolutely. Because I think it's been apparent that the two things that have defined our politics in this country is money and greed. It's affecting every aspect of our life and our future from a youth perspective. When we don't want to live in a world where temperatures are continues to rise, sea levels are rising.

And you're starting to see environmental disasters take place. And that similar sort of pattern even occurs when we talk about gun control and the March for Our Lives Movement is that we're tired of seeing money take more president over students, over youth, and really need more action towards it because we don't want to die from guns or climate change. Well, I can't advance the conversation any more than that. I want to thank both of you for taking time to be with us today. Isabella Falahi, organizer for the Youth Climate Strike and a sophomore at Carmel High School outside of Indianapolis.

Thank you, Isabella, for taking time in your busy day. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Also, Varshini Prakash, co-founder and executive director of the Sunrise Movement. Thank you for taking time for us on this busy day. Thank you. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. After the break, we're going to be talking to more students.

We're checking in with the... student scientist winners of this year's regenerance science talent search. These are big projects dealing with exoplanets and HIV. Our number 844-724-8255 as we talk with the Youth of America. Stay with us. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A quick note. This month marks a big anniversary for chemistry. 150 years since Dmitri Mandalay have 150 years. Why? Seems like yesterday he proposed the design for the periodic table. So we've dropped a special episode into our podcast feed, Tales from the Table, as in Periodic, with voices of the late Dr. Oliver Sacks and Nobel laureates or Harry Croto.

So check it out wherever you get your podcasts. It's about the 150th anniversary of Dimitri Medellayov and the Periodic Table. Next up, we regularly report when scientists make news discovering exoplanets or that. advances in HIV, like we did last week. But when those scientists are teenagers working in those fields, we are extra eager to talk with them. HIV and exoplanets were the topics of the projects that were the big winners of this year's Regeneron Science Talent Search, a program of society for science and the public. And each year, nearly 2,000 of the top science students gather in Washington to showcase their

science projects. and two of those winners are here with us. Let me introduce them. First, Anna Humphrey, a senior at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia. Welcome to Science Friday, Anna. Hi. Thank you for having me. Now, you created a mathematical model to look for exoplanets using data from the Kepler telescope.

Tell us how you did that. Yeah, so a lot of the way exoplanets had been found have been found with a process called the transit method. And the way that works is that a planet passes in front of its star, essentially blocking some of the light and creating a shadow, and we can measure that shadow and figure out, hey, there's an exoplanet here. The problem is if that planet is too small, the shadow will be too small, it'll be hard to find, or if the planet goes above or below the star, we'll end up not seeing the transit because it won't block the light from our perspective. So we have a huge opportunity here to be finding planets that we might have missed just based on the limitations of the method of finding them. and what I did was look for spaces where you could fit more planets with a thought that it might help us identify places where we'd missed them. Do you think you have found new exoplanets that were missed?

Well, so what I was doing was looking for space to fit the planets, right? And so the big thing that that depends on is gravity. So gravity is a thing that pulls us down and keeps us on Earth, right? But gravity also pulls planets closer together. And so the idea was, could I put another planet, like an imaginary planet, in between two that we already knew about, without the gravitational force being so strong that it pulled the other planets off their orbit? And I found that there were, according to some numbers, of 560 places where you could do this. So definitely some places to look. Wow.

So do you think any, do you think exoplanets might have life? What's your personal view on that? You know, I think if there is somewhere else in the universe that has life, exoplanets are a very good bet. It's really exciting because I think that over the next few decades, you know, within my, the beginning of my career, I think that we'll start to have the capabilities for actually, you know, answering that question and looking for biosignatures that, you know, once again, if they exist, we, you know, we give us some indication of that. Tell us how you got interested in this. Yeah, so my freshman year in high school, I had been reading some articles, and I learned about researchers at Caltech that had predicted a ninth planet in our solar system and basically using math, and this was such a fascinating idea. I did more research, and it turns out Neptune was actually found in a similar way.

Basically, astronomers had been looking at Uranus's orbit. They had just figured out that it was a planet, and they couldn't figure out why its orbit kept being different from what we expected it to be. and it took two researchers, two mathematicians, atoms in England and Laverier in France, and they both independently figured out, like ped to paper, that you should have, that if there was another planet in our solar system, it would explain why Uranus's orbit was not behaving the way we expected it to. So once again, they found a planet using math, and that planet was Neptune. And that was, I was so hooked by this idea that I knew I wanted to use math-defined planets, too,

and exoplanets were a great thing to look for. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I know science, as you do, is all about trial and error, and I know you entered a big science fair before, and you ran into a bit of a problem with one of your projects. Want to share that with us?

Yeah, so one of my first year working on the project, I was trying to sort of replicate the process that had been used to find Neptune, which is looking at an orbit that we actually observe and comparing it to one that you modeled, like using a computer simulation, and then trying to use the differences between the two to predict a planet. So I did a model of our own solar system, just sort of as a proof of concept. And because of computational time, I only modeled the first four planets, right, to Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.

So I didn't include Jupiter. And it turns out, when you're doing a gravitational model, right, so gravity is a factor of mass and distance. So a really large object or objects that are really close together are going to have a lot of gravitational forces, our very large gravitational force. As you know, Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system, and I did not include it in my model.

Yes. So I learned, of course, during, I had presented at a big science fair that year, the International Science and Engineering Fair, also actually run by the Society for Science in the Public. And I, well, let's just say that my judges were very keenly aware that I did not include Jupiter. And I am, well, now I have a saying that I've learned from that mistake,

and now I always say, don't get Jupitered, because I always want to be prepared and make sure that I'm thinking about all the possible factors that could affect my result. You got a hashtag for that, don't get Jupiter? Now you do. Now I do, there you go. I want to bring on another of the winning student, Samuel Wiseman, a senior at Harriton High School in Rosamont, Pennsylvania.

Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Thank you for having us. You're welcome. Sam, for your project, you studied HIV and something called reservoirs. Tell us about what you were studying. I was trying to understand why our current medication for HIV doesn't cure the virus. So when our current therapies for HIV came out in the late 80s, early 90s, and they transformed the virus from a death sentence into more of a chronic illness.

But they didn't cure the virus because whenever people with HIV stop taking medication, the infection returns. And that's because of what we call the reservoir, which is just our name for HIV-infected cells that managed to persist even after decades of treatment. And so I was trying to understand how these HIV-infected cells of the reservoir, how they persist even after decades. And so I was looking at the genetic makeup of the virus

over about 10 years in two subjects being treated. And what did you discover? And so I found that the reservoir didn't persist through a very stable force that we used to think. We used to believe that, and this has started to be disproved over the past three years or so, but we used to think that the reservoir was very stable and that HIV managed to survive, despite all this treatment over decades, by kind of flying under the radar. It wouldn't do anything, HIV-infected cells wouldn't do anything that the body could associate with HIV. and the immune system, when it's trying to eliminate invaders, germs,

it looks for things that aren't natural. And so by just hiding out, HIV was able to persist. But I found that that wasn't a complete picture, and that actually over time the body could recognize the virus. So that's a good thing for people with HIV because it shows that our body actually does have the potential to recognize and clear HIV-infected cells in the reservoir. But the problem is that I found that a force,

called clonal expansion is vital to the persistence of the reservoir and that it happens in extremely high frequency. And clonal expansion is just, you know how all the cells in your body are, not all, but a lot of cells in your body are dividing all the time. That's how your skin is constantly reproducing itself. When a cell infected with HIV divides, not only does the human cell divide, but it carries the HIV with it. And so HIV can multiply through natural cell division in your body. And that process is going on even in individuals being treated for HIV, and it leads to the persistence of the reservoir. That explains it. Last week, there was the announcement about a patient that was HIV-free without drugs after receiving a bone marrow transplant. I'm sure you heard about that.

What do you make of that story? I thought that when I read it, I was actually very hopeful and optimistic because it shows that a virus that used to be a deadly virus and a very scary one back 40 years ago. Now, for the second time, we've been able to cure it. And so it's a huge advance for science. In terms of whether that cure itself is usable in over a wide scale for most people with HIV, and it's probably not because it's a fairly lethal procedure and you only use it for people who need it anyway for cancer. but it's reflective of the advances in science we've had over the past decades, and it reflects the fact that HIV isn't so incurable.

The reservoir isn't so persistent that we won't ever be able to get rid of it. Let me ask you, you know, there might be some students listening that are interested, but starting a project like this might sound too big and daunting. What advice do you have for them on how to get started? I think Let me, Anna, go first. Yeah, so it can definitely be daunting. So I mentioned that I started researching exoplanets my freshman year.

I actually hadn't taken physics at that point. So I had a lot to learn. But basically what I did was I started with this idea, right? And this idea, it took the idea that I described. It sort of took a little while to come to light. It was a few months. But I just kept track. I have a research notebook.

I log very regularly. And I just kept track of all of my ideas. I reached out to other students. I actually reached out to a past student who participated in this competition that year. I reached out to as many scientists as I could and just had conversations. And the more conversations you have with people, the more ideas you build over time. So it's really just like coming up with your initial inspiration and then continuing to develop and to develop and to develop it until you feel like you're at a place where you can see. start, you can really start doing the research itself.

Sam, are there other big science issues that you are interested or concerned about? I know today, you know, there are climate strikes going on. Does that kind of thing interest you? Yeah, I think that global warming and climate change are huge problems affecting our time and that we can find solutions to them through science. And I think that that's a huge area for people aspiring to make. a difference in the world for science. There's a lot of ways to do that, and I think researching climate change and potential solutions to it is a huge area to make a difference.

And you know what's interesting about this, let me first remind everybody that this is Science Friday from WNIC Studios talking about science and with Samuel Wiseman and Anna Humphrey. You know what I find interesting is someone who's been around a while and watching a lot of this happen. I'm back in the day. It was a anti-war protests that I was watching, same students, sort of. Students seem to be less fearful about speaking out on it these days. They seem to be, you know, saying, I'm going to go out there and not afraid to show myself in public and speak out. Do you agree with that?

Yeah, I definitely agree. So I actually, I have a nonprofit called Watershed Warriors, and we go and we teach environmental science to elementary school students, particularly like fifth graders in our, in our region. And, you know, one of the remarkable things that I see is that when you tell students that they do have the ability to make a difference, that they can come up with a solution that can actually be implemented and actually have an impact on their community, like that they haven't been told that before, right? They don't know that what they do can matter. And they light up. And I've seen fifth graders, you know, coming up with some of the solutions for local environmental problems that adults are coming up with, you know, the creativity

and the fearlessness is incredible once you tell them that it's possible for them to do something that matters. So I think that it's amazing that we're seeing a lot of students across the country and the world stand up and take advantage of the voice that they have to make their world a little bit better. Sam, do you agree? Yeah. I think that the more people who are involved generally has a huge impact on movements because not only does it make the movement larger, but people have different, ideas. They come from different backgrounds and cultures and experiences, and they all have

different ideas, and they can really develop a movement into something greater than what it was before. Do you think that the publicity that you're getting here and for winning your prizes, do you look forward to that kind of leadership model for you, Hannah? Definitely. I mentioned before that I'd talked to past students from the science talent search. I've actually met a number of students who've done this competition over the years. And honestly, there's some of the people that have inspired me to do research. And the fact that I can be that source of inspiration for someone else is a dream come true. If at least one more person goes out and research exoplanets or whatever area they're interested in, I will have accomplished my job, right?

And Sam, you agree? Yeah, I really like working with people and trying to – to inspire them to have the same passion in whatever area of science or policy or whatever they're interested in. Because I think that when young people especially are really interested in something, they are willing to work really hard and try to make a difference in the world. And so I really appreciate the chance to inspire people along with all the other Regeneron Science Talent Search finalists who I think did amazing work.

And I think in their communities are also working with people to inspire the next generation of scientists. You know, Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Oortez, Cortez, she won a big science award 10 years ago. Did you know that? Yeah. She was an ISF alumni, I think, alumna. Yeah. Does that give you any ideas? We'll see.

Might stick to science, but you never know, right? Yeah. Well, I want to congratulate both of you. Congratulations on your prizes. You're both winners, and this year's Regeneron Science Talent Search, a program of Society for Science and the Public. And thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you for having us.

Samuel Wiseman, Sr. at Harrington High School in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, and Anna Humphrey, Senior at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia. One last note for all our New York area listeners, we're bringing Science Friday to Bam and Brooklyn. Yes, it's a live show. show with topics that are tailor made for you New Yorkers. Like the secret lives of city pigeons. Where do they

go? What do they do? Yeah, don't you wonder about that? We're going to talk about that. And how do you help artificial intelligence decode the sounds of New York City? Like that ice cream truck that's parked outside your window? You hate that, don't you? Well, we're going to talk about all the sounds. Maybe you

get a chance to try to figure out what they're like and decode them. Plus, there's more. We have a live band. We have surprises. Here's the stuff you guys. I don't know. Saturday night, April 27th. Saturday night, it's a night show, April 27th, and tickets and info at Science Friday.com slash Brooklyn. That's live at Bam, Brooklyn Academy of Music.

You know where that is. Saturday night, April 27th. Tickets and info at ScienceFriday.com slash Brooklyn. Charles Berkowitz is our director, our senior producer, Christopher and Taliatta. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, Technical Unengineering Health. today from Sarah Fishman, Kevin Wolfe, and Rich Kim.

And, of course, we're active all week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all the social media. Ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. So, every day, Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato in New York.