Tornadoes Demystified, Global Medicine, and Why the President's First 100 Days Matter

Tornadoes' centers leave you cold and breathless; now we know how. Underuse and overuse of particular medical treatments is a global problem. Plus, the history and politics behind the importance of a president's first 100 days.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to hows to Works Now. I'm your host, Lauren Vogelbaum,
a researcher and writer. Here at hous toff Works. Every week,
I'm bringing you three stories from our team about the
weird and wondrous advances we've seen in science, technology, and culture.
This week, a long running mystery about how Tornado's work
has been solved, and unrelated research into how medical services

(00:25):
are underused and overused around the world could help make
us all healthier. But first, senior editor Katherine Whitbourne and
our freelance writer David Rouse explain a bit of political science.
We wanted to answer a question that came up in
our weekly editorial meeting, Why do we care about the
first one hundred days of a presidency? Right after a

(00:48):
president's inauguration, the media starts to speculate what his first
hundred days will be like. But why the fascination? After all,
we liked presidents for terms of one, four hundred and
sixty days. What's so important of out those first three
months and change? You can blame Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Jonathan Ladd,
Associate Professor of Public Policy and Government at Georgetown University, says,

(01:10):
FDR's first hundred days were so productive that people have
talked about it ever since. Roosevelt came to power in
three in the depths of the Great Depression. He signed
seventy six pieces of legislation in his first hundred days.
Among them, he took the US off the gold standard,
He revamped the banking system, and created jobs through the
Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority. No president

(01:33):
has even come close to this productivity. John F. Kennedy
passed twenty six bills, Ronald Reagan about nine, Barack Obama eleven.
But that doesn't shake the fixation on the first hundred days.
It remains a benchmark of political efficiency and a convenient
measure of a new president's power. So here's what's significant
about that hundred days. New presidents have a sort of

(01:55):
honeymoon period with Congress, so it's easier to push a
new White House legislative agenda. Historically, most presidents come in
with high approval ratings from voters, and in the past,
senators and representatives would cross the alta vote with them.
Professor Ladd explains that even George W. Bush, who won
the two thousand election, by the slimmest of margins, was
popular enough that conservative leaning Democrats helped past his two

(02:18):
thousand one tax cut package. Ladd says this is unlikely
to happen nowadays, since there are a lot fewer conservative
Democrats and liberal Republicans than there used to be, and
President Donald Trump came into power with low approval ratings.
Another reason lots of legislation gets passed during that first
hundred days is the political changing of the guard. When

(02:38):
the White House and Congress are controlled by the same party,
previously defeated bills may get a second chance at life.
For instance, Bill Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave
Act within days of taking office in n He could
act so swiftly because the same bill had previously been
passed by Congress and vetoed by George H. W. Bush.
So the bill is ready to go. Clinton just need

(03:00):
is to sign it. The other thing that makes those
first hundred days so productive is executive actions. Presidents often
use these to reverse the executive actions of their predecessors.
One prime example is the Global Gag rule, which bars
any foreign organization receiving US aid from performing or promoting abortions.
The rule has been enacted and rescinded by executive order

(03:22):
every time the White House has changed political hands since
Ronald Reagan. As you might expect, Trump has reinstated the
executive order that Obama rescinded, and chances are we can
expect a lot more actions like these in the coming
weeks and months. Next up, staff editor Christopher Hassiotas and

(03:43):
freelance writer Patrick Jake Kaiger bring us the scariest science
I've heard this week. Researchers have figured out why the
inside of tornadoes get super cold and leave you gasping
for air. Their data could inspire better technologies and fluid dynamics.
On a summer afternoon in June nineteen fifty five, a

(04:03):
huge tornado touched down in central Nebraska. It zoomed down
and across the North Platte River toward the town of Scottsbluff,
where it would reak havoc. Moments later, three reporters from
a radio station's mobile broadcasting units spotted the funnel just
north of town and tried to flee by driving through
a local cemetery, but they were trapped. They encountered a
lock gate at the other end, and with their escape

(04:24):
cut off. They ditched their vehicle to take refuge in
the basement of a stone building nearby, but they left
the radio transmitter running so the public could hear the
storm's fury. The three broadcasters huddled around the basement furnace
and waited for the tornado to reach them. Pretty soon,
strange things started happening. First they saw shovels, hoes, rakes,
and other tools sucked up and out through the basement's

(04:45):
entrance ramp. Then came total darkness and a deep, deep roar,
and the basement furnace twisted and heaved. Then for a
short time, the men found themselves inside the vortex of
a tornado. Suddenly they felt the temperature drop from a
mild early summer warmth to an unseasonal coolness, and they
had a difficult time breathing now. Fortunately, within minutes, the

(05:07):
roar of the tornado moved off into the distance, and
the reporters were able to step out of the stone building,
which miraculously had suffered only slight damage, while other structures
around it had been leveled. That's a pretty amazing story
of luck and survival, but for decades a few details
about it puzzled scientists, why was the air inside a
tornado's vortex colder and thinner than the air around it. Now,

(05:28):
more than six decades later, researched by Jorgos Fautistas, a
mechanical and industrial engineering professor at Montreal's Concordia University, and
two of his recent graduate students, badwal Ger Pritz Singh
and Rahul Rampa, offers an explanation. Fatistas has been studying
intense vortices, both ones found in nature and man made ones,
for more than a quarter century, and in recent years

(05:50):
he's upgraded his mathematical model to account for factors such
as density variation and the effects of turbulence in the air.
He and his team were able to use the new
model to figure out that it all comes down to
air pockets. Now. Air pockets are localized regions of air
with lower pressure than the surrounding atmosphere as air pockets
within a vortex. In this case, the nineteen tornado moved

(06:12):
from the edge of the vortex towards its center. The
pockets expand. That expansion brings down the temperature of the
air and also makes it thinner. So the more the
pockets expand, the colder it gets, and the thinner the
air gets. In the case of this Nebraska tornado, the
temperature dropped from eighty point six to fifty three point
six degrees fahrenheit or twenty seven to twelve degrees celsius,

(06:34):
and the density of the air felt less than what
you might find high in the mountains, where climbers have
to wear special gear to breathe. That explains why the
trap broadcasters felt chilly and gasped for air. Batista says
that the nineteen fifty five account was the most detailed
account of people surviving the inside of a tornado available.
The new modeling approach, which he developed and described in

(06:56):
the Journal of Aircraft of the American Institute of Aeronautics
and astronaut will help scientists study violent atmospheric vortices such
as tornadoes and water spouts, and beyond understanding the atmosphere,
this new model also should prove useful as an engineering
tool for optimizing the vortex refrigeration tubes used in industrial
processes and for cooling electronic components. And finally, this week,

(07:24):
I've got a story for you from our freelancer Aliya
Quoit about medical science. A series of papers has revealed
the global effects of both the overuse and the under
use of particular medical services. The overuse and under use
of medical services is a global healthcare crisis, but the
medical industry is desperately trying to remedy. As described in

(07:44):
a series of papers published by The Lancet in January
of seventeen, these problems are happening around the world, with
both overuse and under use often occurring side by side
throughout various economies, with both leading to poor health and
well being. Medical service says that are overused often cause
more harm than good because they're applied inappropriately. As the

(08:05):
researchers explain in the first paper in the series, overuse
of unneeded services can harm patients physically and psychologically, and
can harm health systems by wasting resources and deflecting investments
in both public health and social spending, which is known
to contribute to health. The researchers outlined a number of
areas where overuse is commonly reported medications, screening tests, diagnostic tests,

(08:26):
therapeutic procedures including surgery and other invasive procedures, site of
care delivery, such as staying in the hospital when less
intensive care would suffice and end of life care. Each
of these areas are vital and even life saving when
they're indicated by patient history, symptoms, and other specific considerations,
but when used carelessly, the burden is great for both patients,

(08:46):
many of whom still lack adequate insurance, and the health
care system. Among these, medication overuses one of the most
publicly acknowledged examples, especially the overuse of antibiotics. When prescribed unnecessarily,
the threat of microbe old resistance increases, putting both the
patient and the general population at risk. Expensive and sometimes
invasive diagnostic tests like endoscopy and colonoscopy are also commonly overused,

(09:10):
with the US alone reporting an overuse rate of sixtent
for colonoscopy. The anxiety of not catching something serious leads
to this type of overuse. Over diagnosis and subsequent labeling
can also be harmful, and not just because patients might
be taking drugs that they don't actually need. A d
h D is one example that's particularly prevalent in high
income countries. As the researchers explain their scant research on

(09:33):
the effect of an a d h D diagnosis on
a child's sense of self esteem and ability to modulate
their own behavior. But the label has been shown to
affect teachers expectations and peer interactions, which can substantially influence
a child self perceptions. But let's talk about under use.
If there's an affordable, effective medical service available that's likely
to improve your quality of life, it's obvious that people

(09:55):
should use it. Right in a perfect world, the answer
is yes, but many roadblocks can stand in the way.
In both wealthy and poor countries, low cost treatments are
sometimes passed over in favor of expensive technologies. Known causes
of under use include lack of access to affordable healthcare,
not enough doctors or other medical resources to meet the demand,
doctors who need more training and new techniques and recommendations,

(10:17):
and general failure by physicians to deliver the appropriate recommended care.
Often patients choose not to access care or decline recommended treatment,
largely because of issues like language barriers, stigma, culture, distance,
and a general lack of desire and time to navigate
the administrative side of obtaining healthcare. That's our show for

(10:41):
this week. Thank you so much for tuning in further
thanks to our audio producer, Dylan Fagan and our editorial liaisons.
Alice in Laudermilk and Christopher. Subscribe to now Now for
more of the latest science news, and send us links
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(11:02):
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