Short Wave - The Decade In Science

Episode Date: December 30, 2019

As 2019 draws to a close, we enlisted the help of two NPR science correspondents — Nell Greenfieldboye and Joe Palca — to look back on some of the biggest science stories of the past 10 years. Follow host Maddie Sofia on twitter @maddie_sofia. Email the show at [e-mail]. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Maddie Safaya here, happy almost new year to some of my favorite NPR colleagues, Joe Palka, science correspondent. Hello. And Nell Greenfield Boys, also a science correspondent. Hello, Nell. I can't believe we're not your favorite. That's what I wrote. You made like the top some things, some of it.

Yeah, who's better? Come on. Name names. Okay, so we're going to start off today by thinking back 10 years to the tail end of 2009. Maybe you just upgraded to the stunning new iPhone 3, GS. Neither? Okay. You were excited to listen to the year's biggest hit song, Boom Boom, Pow, by the Black Eyed Peas? No. Okay. Or perhaps you were too busy playing Farmville on Facebook.

This is all just making me feel really old. Like, I don't even know what any of that is. Well, okay, great, great. So... We were with it then. You were doing cool stuff then. We were playing games. Clearly, they bring in like the old fogies to talk about... the last decade in science. So obviously the world has changed a lot in the last 10 years. In this episode, we're going to focus on what's happened in the world of science by talking about some of the biggest science stories from the past decade. Before 2019 is gone for good. All right, now, Joe, it's called shortwave, not 45-minute wave. So each of you have chosen one big science story to talk about. And obviously, that means we're going to be leaving out a lot. So in a little bit, we'll do

kind of a lightning round of stories that were also pretty big this decade. That said, now you're up first. Well, I mean, for me, it's got to be the first ever detection of gravitational waves. So this is a huge deal in physics. I mean, gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein like a hundred years ago. He said that if two massive objects smashed together, they should create ripples in space time itself, in the very fabric. of the universe. But back then, he thought this would be such a subtle, small effect that nobody could ever detect it. Right. Still, scientists built these enormous detectors with like lasers going down tubes that are like two miles long and they spent like 30 years working on instruments.

And in 2015, the fall of 2015, they had the first ever detection of gravitational waves when two black holes slammed together. I mean... And those black holes collided all. a long time ago. Long time ago. I mean, the gravitational waves had to reach Earth. It was just the kind of science story you got to love. Something fundamental about the universe, something connected to Einstein, something involving big machines and black holes going boom. It was such obviously a huge deal that it pretty much instantly won the Nobel Prize in physics. Three researchers did. And then it's basically opened up a whole new field of astronomy. So we used to just, you know, look through telescopes at light coming to us from stars. And now we can find things through gravitational waves. So, for example, another

thing they detected was two neutron stars slamming together. And then they were able to tell telescopes around the world, you know, we think we know the general location that something big happened. And then researchers could point their regular telescopes and actually see the light coming from this event that they never would have been able to have detected before. I'm blown away by it. I think it's, I agree with Now, it's just such a beautiful experiment and showing the wave, the function of this gravitational wave is exactly how they drew it up. You do it theoretically and then you make the measurement and you see, ooh, they line up. It's really incredible. They also had to persist for decades.

Yeah, this is like part of the story is just how you continue to get funding for something that doesn't have a result, which is like mind blowing to me. Yeah, yeah. It was mostly the National Science Foundation funding it. And I think that, you know, you really wonder in the world of science if that would happen today. All right. Joe Palka. You're next. What's your big science story? Well, I'd have to say it's this thing, which I'm sure you know about Maddie, called CRISPR. It's an ability to modify genes inside cells. And yes, people could do that before, but it was hard. And it required lots of time. And sometimes many generations of cell lines and organisms and what have you. And this was like one step. And the thing that I like best about it is it wasn't a bunch of people sitting down in a room and saying, why don't we build a gene editing tool? No, they were studying, and I love the way this sounds, they were studying how bacteria avoid getting the flu, essentially. How bacteria avoid getting infected with viruses. And it turns out they have these sequences where they kind of remember the DNA of a virus they've seen before, and then they have an enzyme that they can go and cut

something if it comes in, it's that virus. And what these people in Berkeley, and then subsequently Brod Institute at MIT, realizes, hey, we could hijack this tool that bacteria have evolved and use it not just for viral sequences of DNA, but any sequence of DNA. And, oh, my goodness, the implications are, well, you could do something inside a human embryo. And wow, that would be bad, only it's already happened. This Chinese scientist, He Jong-Qui, modified genes and embryos that would make the embryos or the subsequent babies less susceptible to HIV infection. Right. And it was a big deal. And it was a huge deal.

And yes, that captured the headlines. And I'm not saying that's not important. But the transformational role that CRISPR played in biology, I mean, I went to Colorado State University and I asked like, 10 different scientists in 10 different disciplines is CRISPR affecting your life and every single one? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely transforming scientists lives in the way they're doing work. It's also transforming the lives of, you know, potentially of patients because, you know, we had a shortwave episode about the first woman to be treated for sickle cell disease with CRISPR. And it's the clinical applications, the general basic science applications are huge. And I just think just the fact that human beings were genetically modified using the,

this technique. I mean, you have to understand, I've been in science journalism for 25 years. And the entire time I've been in journalism, people have been talking about genetically modifying human beings. Right. And it happened. Yeah. They did it with CRISPR. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. So before we get to the lightning round, we cannot talk about the decade and science without mentioning climate change, right? Which is really the biggest story of this century, I would argue, not necessarily this decade. And not so much a story as a gigantic field of study and something that is happening to the entire planet. So, keeping that in mind, we know that, for example, a UN report from this past November said that greenhouse gas emissions rose steadily throughout the decade. But what's really changed,

I think, in this decade is that more and more people are starting to live through obviously climate-driven weather, meaning frequent and severe storms, droughts, heat waves, and other extreme weather and when people start to be affected by things, that changes their perspective on it a lot. So a big survey earlier this year found that nearly half of Americans safe people in the United States are being harmed by global warming right now. You know, when we were talking about this sort of like top stories of the decade, like it wouldn't have really necessarily occurred to me to pick climate change, which as you said is like a whole field of study. Yeah. And I think that it's, it's a difficult thing because like anything in history that's kind of like incremental,

like any kind of movement or a growing public awareness is often incremental. But I really feel like something shifted this decade. I feel like there's a lot more public acceptance that this is not something really to be debated anymore, that the real debate is what's to be done. Yeah. Okay. Lightning Round. Stories that were really big, but we definitely don't have time.

so we're just going to say like a few words about each of them. Sound good? Yes. All right. Let's go. Nell, lightning round. Give me A-1. So in 2011, NASA retires its space shuttle program.

The United States has had no independent access to space for people. Since then, we rely on Russia to take our astronauts to the International Space Station. There's companies developing what are going to be sort of commercial space taxis, but they haven't flown with people yet. Palka. Well, Bokia mosquitoes. That's this bacteria that infects mosquitoes and makes them unenational. able to transmit dengue or Zika virus. Really important. Now what Greenfield boys? Exoplanets. We discovered thousands of them in the Kepler Space Telescope. Let us know

that planets around other stars are now common in the Milky Way. All right. I'm saying algorithms all the time everywhere making decisions run in our lives. Pictures of Pluto. Okay, now, go. Solar eclipse. Hey-yo. Okay. So maybe that's not like unexpected that the moon would It clips the sun, but it was watched by like 200 million Americans or something like that. And I think it was a big like event of the decade for Americans thinking about science. Absolutely. Picture of a black hole. I was going to say picture of a black hole.

I thought I'd get there before you. Yeah. All right. Well, I'll pick a way less fun topic, which is Ebola, the outbreaks, vaccine development, treatment. We had that going on. Let me think, let me think, think, think, think, think, think, think, think, think, oh, water on Mars. They found more water on Earth. No, I'm so tired of Mars.

See, see. First interstellar object that we were aware of. Oh, that was good. And the second interstellar object that we were aware of, which I heard all about on Shortwave. And then I will say, lastly, our relationship with genetic testing has changed phenomenally. Everybody's getting genetic tests. 23 and me. Ancestry all the time.

Our relationship with our own genetic data has changed. Wait, one more. Higgs boson, that particle that explains why matter has massed. The God particle. Ooh. Did it. Lightning round, complete. Thank you both. And I am sure there are stories that we've missed. And I'm sure that you, dear listeners, will let us know about that. Ten years is a lot of science.

Okay, NPR science correspondence, Nell Greenfield Boys, Joe Palka, happy new year to the both of you. Happy New Year. I hope you get some rest and stay away from this place and enjoy it with your friends and your family. Stay away from this place. Are you kidding? This is where I go for vacation. This episode was produced by Brett Bachman and Rebecca Ramirez and edited by Andrea Kissick. I'm Maddie Safaya. We're back tomorrow with more shortwave from NPR.