11.20.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello. This Kelly Taylor. Then I'll be your host for
Radio Wise Diary of Science and Nature. We'll have some
articles on the topics of science and nature. But first
a reminder that radioi is a reading service and it's
intended for people who are blind or have other disabilities

(00:24):
that make it difficult to read printed material. We're going
to start off with an article from Scientific American and
the headline for this article reads December twenty twenty five
Science History from fifty one hundred and one hundred and
fifty years ago, written by Mark Fischetti, So fifty years ago,

(00:51):
nineteen seventy five. Heimlich maneuver quote. The list of first
aid procedures that the medical profession encourages late people to
undertake is short because of concern that tactics applied in
ignorance may do more harm than good. Now, however, the
American Medical Association has cautiously endorsed the Heimlich maneuver as

(01:14):
a first aid procedure when someone is choking on a
foreign object, described by Henry J. Heimlich, the Cincinnati surgeon
who developed it. In the Heimlich maneuver, you get behind
the victim and wrap your arms around their waist. Put
the thumb side of your fist or the heel of
your palm against the victims of her abdomen between the
navel and the bottom of the rib cage, and make

(01:36):
a quick upward thrust. The action elevates the diaphragm, thereby
compressing the lungs and forcing air up through the trachea.
The air expels the foreign object. Heimlich writes that since
he first described the technique, he has heard of one
hundred and sixty two people whose lives were saved nineteen

(01:57):
twenty fivehundred years ago. Exhausted universe, what has science to
say of the future. The physicists can tell us that
the universe is running down, for heat tends to escape
by radiation from the surfaces of stars, planets, and all
other bodies slowly. Then all things must cool down, depleted

(02:18):
to the point of exhaustion, so that the final scene
of the play shows only cold, dark bodies, frozen, rigid
and lifeless, moving in their orbits in impenetrable darkness. Most
completely irreversible would appear to be the newly discovered process
by which matter is turned into free energy. Thus, also

(02:39):
before the last gleams of light disappear. The principal actors.
The stars have dwindled away to mere shrunken remnants of
their old cells. Telephone, diplomacy, embassies and consulates, university scholarships,
lecture tours, propaganda all have had for years their supreme object,

(03:01):
a better understanding, a closer friendship between America and the
old world. Now comes the announcement that soon you may
pick up your telephone and talk with a person in
London as easily if they were in the next street.
What is more, you can do this at a cost
of five dollars for three minutes. Here is an achievement
which outweighs a century of striving for international accord. When

(03:23):
people talk directly to one another easily, cheaply, and constantly
about their daily affairs, it becomes more and more difficult
for them to misunderstand each other. As an insurance of peace,
the inauguration of the five dollars three minute transatlantic telephone
rate may well rank with the best treaty ever signed

(03:44):
and from eighteen seventy five, one hundred and fifty years ago,
new route to Siberia. Professor Nordenschkold recent journey from Norway
to Siberia by way of the Yugorsky Strait and the
Sea of Kara has caused quite a sensation in Russia.
At a meeting of the Society for the Encouragement of

(04:05):
Commerce and Industry, mister Sideroff said the journey was one
to be ranked in importance with the discovery of a
new world, as it would, in all probability lead to
the establishment of a regular line of communication between Northern
Europe and Siberia, and the vast resources of the latter
country would at last find an outlet along her great

(04:26):
fluvial highways. And training fleas, Mister Bertolado, the well known
educator of the flea, is now in New York exhibiting
his curious success. The insect he employs appears to be
the species of flea common to dogs. The first lesson,
he says, is to put the fleas in a small

(04:47):
circular glass box, whereby jumping and knocking their heads against
the glass for a day or two, the idea is
finally beaten into them that it is useless to jump.
During the remainder of their natural lives. About eight months,
they are content to crawl. The instructor then fastens a
delicate pair of wire nippers to the middle of the
flea's body. To the nippers, any desired form of miniature

(05:11):
vehicles such as a wheelbarrow, car, or wagon is attached,
and the flea trots away with the load. The professor
harnesses his insect pupils to perform many curious duties, such
as the operation of a fortune telling wheel, orchestra playing
or racing. The fleas are allowed to feed twice daily

(05:32):
upon the instructor's arm. All right, and now on a
little bit more serious side again from Scientific American, and
this is dated November eighteenth. They are featuring five essential
reeds on plastic power and pollution. This is by Brianne Cain.

(05:55):
The fossil fuel industry is pivoting to plastics. Massive companies
are launching new refineries and other industrial plants to make
plastic from petrochemicals. Science journalist Beth Gardner follows this story
in the December issue of Scientific American, where you meet
the communities being harmed and the company's spending billions of

(06:17):
dollars to control the future plastic. To compliment that read,
here are a few books that you can dive into
and explore the wild world of waste management, the chemistry
of plastics, and more examples of corporate espionage and drama.
There's Plastic Ink, The secret history and shocking future of
Big Oil's biggest bet, and that is by Beth Gardner.

(06:40):
February twenty twenty six is when It's coming out, Beth
Gardner's new book about Big Oil's bet on plastics futures,
coming out in February. She discusses the history that led
us here in the big money spent to convince us
not to recycle, reduce our carbon footprint, or worry about
single use plastic. Then there's They Poisoned the World Life

(07:03):
and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals by Mariah
Blake that's coming out May twenty twenty five. In this
fascinating book, investigative reporter Mariah Blake gives readers an account
of the big businesses that are trying to hide the
dangers of forever chemicals and the tricks they've used to
keep the toxins off the public's radar. Then there's Waste

(07:23):
Wars The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash by Alexander Clapp,
coming out in February. Take a wild ride around the Globe,
as journalist Alexander Clapp shows you how plastic gets smashed, melted,
or lost at sea in an attempt to get garbage
out of sight as soon as possible, no matter the cost.

(07:44):
Then there's Saving Us, A climate scientist's Case for Hope
and Healing in a Divided World by Catherine Hayho September
came out in September twenty twenty one. Atmospheric scientist Katherine
Hayho delivers an eye domistic view of our planet's future
in this book, which climate scientist and author Kate Marvel

(08:05):
applauds for its directness and optimism. Then there's Citizen Coke.
The Making of Coca Cola Capitalism. That's by bartow Elmore
came out in December of twenty sixteen. If you're looking
for a dramatic story of conspiracy and espionage, plenty more
drama unfolds in this book by historian bartow Elmore, who

(08:29):
examines how a certain soda manufacturer has affected the environment,
our wallets, and our day to day purchasing decisions. All right,
and now staying with Scientific American. This is from November nineteenth,
written by Kate Graham Shaw. These Birds learned to tweet

(08:53):
like R two D two. Listen to the uncanny results.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away,
R two D two beeped and booped, and now birds
that copy the star wars character are giving scientists fresh
insight into how different species imitate complex sounds. A study

(09:13):
published recently in Scientific Reports analyzed the sounds of nine
species of parrots, including budgies, as well as European starlings,
to see how accurately each bird mimicked R two D
two's robotic worrying. Researchers did acoustic analyses on samples of
birds imitating the plucky droid that were already available online

(09:37):
to compare how statistically similar each bird's noises were to
a model of R two D two sounds. The starlings,
a type of songbird, emerged as star vocalists. Their ability
to produce multiphonic noises, in their case, two different notes
or tones expressed simultaneously allowed them to replicate R two

(10:00):
D two s complex chirps more accurately. Parrots and budgies,
which only produce monophonic or single tone noises, imitated the
doriage sounds with less accuracy and musicality. The differing abilities
stem from physical variations in the bird's syrinx, a unique
vocal organ that sits at the base of the avian windpipe. Quote.

(10:24):
Starlings can produce two sounds at once because they control
both sides of the syrinx independently, says study co author
Nick dam and evolutionary biologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Quote,
parrots are physically incapable of producing two tones simultaneously. In quote,

(10:44):
it isn't exactly known why different species developed differing control
over their syrincs. Quote. Likely some ancestor of songbirds happened
to evolve the ability to control the muscles on both
sides of the syrinx, and this helped them in some way,
says University of Northern Colorado biologist Lauren Benedict, who wasn't

(11:05):
involved in the study but sometimes works with its authors.
One of the leading explanations involves mating. The better at
singing a male songbird is the more females he attracts.
Though the study is a really elegant way of approaching
this question of whether the starlings versus the parrots are
capable of producing the same sound with the same accuracy.

(11:27):
It doesn't fully address how much training or rewards the
birds received, says Nicole Creanza, evolutionary biologist at Vanderbilt who
also wasn't involved in the research. Benedict agrees that the
researchers could work with the public to do more tightly
controlled trials, and she and other scientists are looking for
public submissions of other examples of parrots imitating sounds for

(11:51):
their quote the Many Parrots project. A wider sample would
be really neat, she says, and they could test all
kinds of different sounds, not just R two D two.
And now, sticking with Scientific American, we have an article
from their Planetary Science section, Mars sample that may contain

(12:14):
evidence of life might never come home, written by Jonathan O'Callahan.
Right now, one of the most advanced planetary explorers ever
built is scouring the surface of Mars, supported by a
team of hundreds of scientists back on Earth. The Perseverance
Rover has traveled nearly the distance of a marathon to

(12:35):
answer some of the biggest questions about our neighboring world.
What was the planet like eons ago? Was it ever habitable?
Did it host life. One rock visited by Perseverance, called
Chiava Falls, is speckled with iron rich minerals that might
be able to answer these questions. On Earth, the presence

(12:56):
of these minerals usually means microbs that used iron in
the chemical reactions essential to their metabolism once lived. There
does the same hold true on Mars. A piece of
Chiava Falls is safely tucked inside the rover's storage cache.
If it can be shipped to Earth, analysis with the
full range of laboratory equipment here could tell us the answer.

(13:20):
But Chaiava Falls ride to our planet might have fallen
through the Perseverance rovers. The first phase of a multi
step mission to bring bits of Mars to Earth, known
as Mars Sample Return or MSR, and the next step
is dangling by a thread. The Trump administration has proposed
canceling the return portion of the endeavor. The mission's fate,

(13:44):
as a press time rests with the US Congress. The
situation has dismayed scientists who have longed to get their
hands on Martian rocks. We've been working for so many
decades to try to make this happen, says Vicki Hamilton,
a planetary geologist at Southwest Research Institute's Colorado branch now
the Perseverance has scooped up prized samples, saying to surfaced

(14:08):
with the prospect of having them on Mars or leaving
them on Mars to languish quote, it's hard to watch.
Even if the mission isn't canceled, how to finish it
remains an open question. In twenty twenty four, NASA said
it was scrapping its initial troubled plan for MSR, deemed
too costly and too far behind schedule to seek cheaper

(14:31):
commercial approaches. The agency now has multiple options on the table,
but as yet to decide which course to take. If
any at stake are potentially profound insights about Mars. We
know that some three billion to four billion years ago,
Mars was warm and wet, with lakes and seas on

(14:51):
its surface. What we don't know is whether life ever
took cold there. Can we find out? Perseverance touched down
on Mars in February twenty one, following a nail bier
of a landing, after the spacecraft had torn through the
Martian atmosphere and descended toward the surface by parachute. A
crablike rocket propelled platform called Skycrane lowered the rover on

(15:15):
cables to the surface. It landed inside Jezero Crater, a
twenty eight mile wide dentt in the Martian landscape. A
river once flowed there, and the bone dry delta it
left behind is visible from space. If anything ever lived
on Mars, Jezzio is as good a place as any

(15:35):
to look for signs of it. It's nearly impossible, however,
to send a mission to Mars that would be capable
of finding life without help from labs on Earth. That's
why scientists have been lobbying since the nineteen sixties for
a way to bring pieces of Mars here. MSR is
the culmination of those efforts. In two thousand, Scott Hubbard,

(15:59):
NASA's first Mars program director, sometimes called the Mars Czar,
was tasked with turning around the fortunes of an ailing
program that had experienced multiple failures in the nineteen nineties,
including the loss of two orbiters and a lander. Quote
I took the existing program down to the roots, almost
a bare sheet of paper, Hubbard says. The top priority,

(16:21):
he says, was to find out did life ever exist
on Mars? And could it be there today. Interest in
Martian life had been spurred by a now infamous announcement
from the White House lawn in nineteen ninety six, when
President Bill Clinton declared that signs of life had been
detected in a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica. That claim

(16:42):
was later refuted, but it caused enough clamor to put
the search for Martian life at the top of NASA's agenda.
NASA put a plan in place. Rovers and orbiters would
probe the planet to identify good places to look for
evidence of life. Then a rover would head there to
grab samples, and a third phase would bring them to Earth.

(17:04):
In twenty twelve, NASA announced the Mars twenty twenty mission,
which would land a rover later named Perseverance to collect
the samples. By twenty thirty, a follow up mission would
collect these samples and return them to Earth at an
estimated cost of slightly less than six billion dollars. Perseverance
launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida July twenty twenty, not

(17:26):
far behind. Scientists hope the retrieval mission would follow the
Perseverance's journey, the largest rover ever sent to Mars. Has
been exploring the red planet since February twenty twenty one.
During its more than thirty seven kilometers about twenty three
miles of roving, Perseverance has collected various samples of rock

(17:46):
to be stored until a future mission can carry them
back to Earth to be studied in laboratories. That follow
up mission, however, is imperiled. The Trump administration has proposed
canceling it amid broader budget cuts for science and space exploration.
Then there is a map showing Perseverance's path on Mars,

(18:09):
and there are certain blue and orange circles on the
map indicating spots where samples were picked up and dropped
at a backup location called three forks, where they could
be retrieved at a later date. So, in September twenty

(18:30):
twenty one, Perseverance collected its first sample, a type of
volcanic rock called basalt, possibly the result of a volcano
erupting into Jesero Crater after it was formed. If the
stone could be analyzed and dated on Earth, it would
help scientists determine the earliest time that water could have
flowed into Jezero, estimated to be about three point eight

(18:51):
billion years ago. Since then, the rover's been gradually making
the twenty mile trek toward the rim of Jezero, traveling
up the delta of the now absent river. Equipped with
the sampling arm and a drill. Perseverance carries forty three
cigar sized tubes into which it can deposit interesting samples
that it is collected, selected by scientists back home who

(19:15):
are watching its every move. The rover dropped ten of
these tubes at a spot called Three Forks between December
twenty two and January twenty twenty three, a contingency cash
in case the vehicle later failed. The most valuable samples
collected farther up the river bed in locations where the

(19:36):
prospects for life look more promising, remain on board Perseverance.
These include the Chiava Falls tube retrieved in March twenty
twenty four, which was collected in a region called Bright Angel. Quote.
Everybody's probably most excited about the Bright Angel samples, says
Brianni Horgan. Planetary scientists that produce university quote they have

(20:02):
potential biosignatures in them. Quote. The Chayava Falls rock has
our first confident detection of organic matter, says Perseverances Project
scientist Kenneth Farley of California Institute of Technology the rocks
blotches and speckles could be associated with ancient Martian life.

(20:23):
Farley says it is the most interesting sample in our
entire collection. Scientists get giddy thinking about what they could
do with these rocks here on Earth. Quote. We would
look for a series of properties that are really hard
to explain by any abiotic that's non biological mechanisms, says
Tanya Bozak's geobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and

(20:49):
a member of the Perseverance Sample science team. In other words,
these samples might be our first concrete evidence of life
on another world. Researchers would check for material left behind
by decayed microbes, for instance, or in imbalance in two
key forms of carbon, carbon twelve and carbon thirteen. Quote.
If you have a dead log on Earth with some

(21:10):
kind of dead plant matter, you'll see a lot of
carbon twelve both, Socks says. Other evidence of life could
include microfossils, physical shapes in the rocks themselves. It might
be the fossilized remains of ancient critters. Quote. There should
be some organic compounds or minerals present that we know
are good at preserving microbial shapes. She says it's hard

(21:32):
to overstate how important this discovery would be. It would
constitute the first evidence of life on another world, proof
that Earth was not the only place in the universe
to become inhabited. We would know that with the right
ingredients and conditions, life could form anywhere. The quest to
bring Mars Rock's home is not solely about life, though.
The project could explain why the planet now has no

(21:55):
magnetic field and barely any atmosphere, two characteristics that are
probably linked. Mars atmosphere might have been mostly blown away
by the Sun billions of years ago when the planet's
core stopped generating a protective magnetic field, possibly a result
of the planet cooling and plate tectonics. Ending samples collected

(22:17):
by Perseverance could tell us when this all happened, and
why electrons in the ground should be oriented in the
direction of the planet's magnetic field at different points in time,
like a fossil record of the field, says Benjamin Weiss,
planetary scientist at MIT X Ray scans of the samples
taken on Earth could detect these orientations, which could be

(22:38):
matched with various data, including markings on Mars surface that
Perseverance made when it collected the rocks. These measurements would
reveal a timeline of activity in the planet's core and
maybe solved the mystery of why today Mars, compared with Earth,
is such a hell hole. Knowledge that could help us
in the search for habitable worlds outside our solar system.

(23:05):
Now from the Washington Post, one of America's most dangerous
volcanoes will soon power homes. This is November nineteenth by
Nicholas Rivero. On the slopes of an Oregon volcano, engineers
are building the hottest geothermal power plant on Earth. The
plant will tap into the infernal energy of Newberry Volcano,

(23:28):
one of the largest and most hazardous active volcanoes in
the United States. According to the US Geological Survey, it
has already reached temperatures of six hundred and twenty nine
degrees fahrenheit, making it one of the hottest geothermal sites
in the world, and next year will start selling electricity
to nearby homes and businesses. But the startup behind the project,

(23:49):
Masama Energy, wants to crank the temperature even higher, north
of seven hundred and fifty degrees and become the first
to make electricity from what industry insiders call SuperH Enthusiasts
say that could usher in a new era of geothermal power,
transforming the always on clean energy source from a minor

(24:10):
player to a major force in the world's electricity systems. Quote.
Geothermal has been mostly inconsequential, says Vinod Koshla, a venture
capitalist and one of Mazama Energy's biggest financial backers. Quote.
To do consequential geothermal that matters at the scale of
tens or hundreds of gigawats for the country and many

(24:31):
times at globally, you really need to solve these high temperatures. Today,
geothermal produces less than one percent of the world's electricity,
but tapping into super hot rock, along with other technological advances,
could boost that share to eight percent by twenty fifty.
According to the International Energy Agency, geothermal using super hot

(24:53):
temperatures could theoretically generate one hundred and fifty times more
electricity than the world uses to the IEA. Quote, we
believe this is the most direct path to driving down
the cost of geothermal and making it possible across the globe,
said Terra Rodgers. Program director for super Hot Rock Geothermal

(25:14):
at the Clean Air Task Force environmentalist think tank. The
technological gaps are within reason. These are engineering iterations, not breakthroughs.
The new Very Volcano project combines two big trends that
could make geothermal energy cheaper and more widely available. First,

(25:35):
Mazama Energy is bringing its own water to the volcano
using a method called enhanced geothermal energy. Historically, people have
been able to use geothermal energy only in rare locations
that have hot rocks and underground water creating natural pockets
of steam. That limits conventional geothermal to a handful of

(25:55):
hot spots in countries such as Japan, Iceland, Kenya, and
d the American West. But over the past few decades,
pioneering projects had started to make energy from hot, dry
rocks by cracking the stone and pumping in water to
make steam. Borrowing fracking techniques developed by the oil and
gas industry. The geothermal startup Fervo Energy and the US

(26:18):
Department of Energy have built pilot projects in Nevada and Utah,
and international researchers have demonstrated the technology in France, Germany, Switzerland,
and Japan. Pumping water into rock fractures risks causing earthquakes,
much like injecting wastewater from fracking. A Swiss enhanced geothermal

(26:39):
experiment was shut down after setting off a three point
four magnitude quake in two thousand and six. Sensors at
the Newberry site recorded five trimmers in the past six months,
with the biggest reaching magnitude two point five on July
twenty four. Scientists say earthquakes will always be a risk,

(27:00):
but it can be managed with good monitoring and engineering.
The Energy Department says water pollution risks are low because
geothermal plants recirculate the same water in sealed wells, passing
through reservoirs much deeper than most groundwater. The Newberry project
also taps into hotter rock than any previous enhanced geothermal project,

(27:23):
but even Newberries six hundred and twenty nine degrees falls
short of the super hot threshold of seven hundred and
five or above. At that temperature and under a lot
of pressure, water becomes supercritical and starts acting like something
between a liquid and a gas. Supercritical water holds lots
of heat like a liquid, but it flows with the
ease of gas, combining the best of both worlds. For

(27:47):
generating electricity. A super hot thermal well could produce five
to ten times more energy than a well at typical temperatures.
That means geothermal operators don't have to drill as many
Moulti million dollar holes in the ground, bringing down costs.
Well that's off