Emily Schwing: In October 2019 an international team of scientists onboard an icebreaker intentionally let Arctic Sea ice freeze up around the ship. They wante d to learn more about the ice itself. But in April 2020, just halfway through the year-long experiment, it was unclear if that ice would stay frozen for the remaining six months of the project.
Sea ice, according to scientists, is melting at an alarming rate—so quickly that some researchers believe traditional methods for forecasting its extent may not keep up with the pace of a changing climate.
By the year 2050, the Arctic could be ice-free in the summer months. And shipping traffic in the region is on the rise, but predicting sea ice extent is complicated.
Today we’re looking at how machine learning—artificial intelligence—could become the tool of the future for sea ice forecasting.
Leslie Canavera: We build artificial intelligence and machine learning models for the Arctic, based on the science of oceanography.
Schwing: That’s Leslie Canavera. She is CEO of a company called PolArctic, and she is trying to forecast ice in a different way than science ever has.
Since the late 1970s, scientists have relied on physics and statistical modeling to create sea ice forecasts.
Canavera: When you take two water molecules, and you freeze them together, you know, like, right, this is how they freeze together. But there’s a lot of assumptions in that. And when you extrapolate to the ocean, there’s a lot of error.... And statistical modeling is based on, like, historical things of what’s happened. But with climate change, it’s not acting like the history anymore. And so artificial intelligence really takes the best of both of those and is able to learn the system and trends to be able to forecast that more accurately.
Schwing: Of course, that foundation of statistics and historical data is still important, even with its errors and caveats.
Holland: We can't model every centimeter of the globe.
Schwing: Marika Holland is a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. The center has been using physics and statistical modeling to predict sea ice extent for the past five decades. Holland says that she is confident in the methodology but that these forecasts aren’t perfect.
Holland: You know, we have to kind of coarsen things, and so we get a little bit of a muddy picture of how the sea ice cover is changing or how aspects of the climate or the Earth’s system are evolving over time.
Schwing: Marika says there are also a lot of smaller-scale processes that can create problems for accurate forecasting.
Holland: Something like the snow cover on the sea ice, which can be really heterogeneous, and that snow is really insulating, it can affect how much heat gets through the ice.... We have to approximate those things because we aren’t going to resolve every centimeter of snow on the sea ice, for example.... So there’s always room for improvement in these systems.
Schwing: It’s that space—the room for improvement—where Leslie says artificial intelligence can be most helpful. And that help is especially important right now because of what is happening in the Arctic.
According to the Arctic Council, marine traffic increased by 44 percent through the Northwest Passage between 2013 and 2019. Search-and-rescue capabilities in the region are limited, and there has been increased attention on the region for its vast natural resource development potential. Leslie says AI can create a forecast on a smaller scale, homing in on specific locations and timing to benefit those user groups.
Canavera : We did a seasonal forecast and then an operational forecast where the seasonal forecast was 13 weeks in advance. We were able to forecast when their route would be open..., and we were actually to the day on when the route would be able to be open and they would be able to go. And then we did operational forecasts where it was like,“All right, you’re in the route, what [are] the weather conditions kind of looking like?”
Schwing: Using AI to forecast sea ice extent isn’t a novel approach, but it is gaining traction. A team led by the British Antarctic Survey’s Tom Anderson published a study two years ago in the journal Nature Communications. In a YouTube video that year, Tom touted the benefits of his team’s model, called IceNet.
[CLIP: Anderson speaks in YouTube video: “What we found is super surprising. IceNet actually outperformed one of the leading physics-based models in these long-range sea ice forecasts of two months and beyond while also running thousands of times faster. So IceNet could run on a laptop while previous physics-based methods would have to run for hours on a supercomputer to produce the same forecasts.”]
Schwing: One of the biggest limitations when it comes to AI-generated sea ice forecasts is what Leslie calls “the black box.”
Canavera: And you have all of this data. You put it into the artificial intelligence black box, and then you get the answer. And the answer is right. And scientists get very frustrated because they’re like, “Well, tell me what the black box did,” right? And you’re like, “Well, it gave you the right answer.” And so there's a big trend in artificial intelligence that is called XAI, and explainable AI si hwat that kind of relates to and “Why did your artificial intelligence give you the right answer?”
Sometimes, she says, AI happens upon the right answer but for the wrong reasons. That’s why Marika at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says the most effective sea ice forecasts are likely to come from combining both machine learning and five decades’ worth of physics and statistical modeling.
Holland: If machine learning can help to improve those physics-based models, that’s wonderful. And that is kind of the avenues that we’re exploring—is how to use machine learning to improve these physics-based models that then allow us to kind of predict how the climate and the sea ice system are going to change on decadal, multidecadal [kinds] of timescales.
Schwing: And there’s one piece of the sea ice forecasting puzzle Leslie, who is Alaska Native, believes is irreplaceable: traditional Indigenous knowledge.
Canavera: What's great about traditional Indigenous knowledge and artificial intelligence is that a lot of traditional Indigenous knowledge is data, and artificial intelligence builds models on data. And that’s why it works better than these like dynamical models in being able to incorporate the traditional Indigenous knowledge.
For Science, Quickly, I’m Emily Schwing.
Scientific American’s Science, Quickly is produced and edited by Tulika Bose, Jeff DelViscio and Kelso Harper. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.
You can listen to Science, Quickly wherever you get your podcasts. For more up-to-date and in-depth science news, head to ScientificAmerican.com. Thanks, and see you next time.
Jocie Bentley (tape): PSA: don’t bring hiking boots when walking the tundra. Your feet will get soaked like a wet sponge.
Gabriel Hould Gosselin (tape): Almost there. [laughs] About halfway. Well, it’s a lot faster with snowmobiles.
Bentley: Hey, I’m Jocie Bentley, and this is the final episode of a three-part Science, Quickly Fascination series from a fast-warming Arctic.
Today I’m heading to a place called the Trail Valley Creek Research Station, high in the Canadian Arctic. I’m sloshing along with Gabriel Hould Gosselin. Gabriel is a research assistant for Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario and the University of Montreal.
We actually did his original interviews in French, so you are listening to a combination of field audio and a new interview in English.
Gosselin: Alright, so I brought you about 60 kilometers north of Inuvik, which is a little town at the top of the Northwest Territories, out near the Tuktoyaktuk highway in the tundra.
Bentley: We passed the tree line on our drive. No more trees, just a flat carpet of orange and red tundra, covering softly rolling hills. It’s unlike any landscape I’ve ever seen.
Gosselin: There’s permafrost all over the place. It’s super deep. It’s, like, four- to 600 meters, depending, deep.
Bentley: So for all you non-Metric listeners, that’s 1,300 to almost 2,000 feet deep. That’s deeper than almost all of the world’s tallest skyscrapers.
Gosselin: And that’s permafrost being permanently frozen ground, ground that doesn’t go above zero degrees Celsius. Of course, the top layer kind of thaws over summer and then refreezes over winter.
Bentley: And that is exactly the part that Gabriel is most interested in.
Gosselin: That’s the area that is active, that has bacteria kind of decomposing organic matter and farting out carbon dioxide and methane ...
Bentley: [Laughs]
Gosselin: I mean, there’s this kind of methane bomb. That's what people are thinking about, and thinking ...
Bentley: The more there is, the more trouble we’re in.
Gosselin: Oh, boy, if things keep on warming, there’s a whole bunch of ground that’s been frozen for a long time with basically a huge pool of carbon that’s just ready to be digested by those methane-producing bacteria.
Bentley: And that’s a huge concern for researchers such as Gabriel.
Gosselin: What’s going to happen? And that’s, that’s a concern. What’s going on in the Arctic?
Bentley: And that’s why he’s here. There’s only one way to learn the answer to that question, and it’s with data.
Gosselin: There’s been very little real sampling that’s been done. I mean, there’s more and more stuff that comes out. There’s more and more satellites that are put out there that are much better and better at looking at different wavelengths. Some of them use radar. Some of them use infrared. Some of them actually see, measure directly, the amount of methane that’s in the air in certain areas.
Bentley: But those methods are less reliable without actual measurements from the ground.
Gosselin: To validate those measurements, we need ground-truthing data, so, data that comes from the area that that satellite’s looking at to kind of compare what’s being measured and from up there and then what’s being measured from the ground.
Bentley: And that’s why we’re standing among a bunch of white tents on red tundra. It’s all cleaned up for the offseason.
Bentley (tape): Is it not normally this clean?
Gosselin: I mean, normally there’s a bunch of people living here, so there’s stuff everywhere.
Uh, normally we have a bug net, like, uh, one of those, uh, kind of gazebo bug net things. Yeah. And then we set up tents all around here. I mean, normally there’s a whole bunch of chairs, and, uh, you know, when we get a heater going, people kind of, it’s where we eat and just spend our time. It’s tea! And it’s nice and clean.
Bentley: We make our way to Gabriel’s main research station. It’s called an eddy covariance tower.
Gosselin: A private company installed the tower. I just installed the instruments on it. Yeah, I spent 30 hours on it.
Bentley: So he climbed 20 meters, or 65 feet, up this skinny tower carrying giant pieces of equipment. Here’s what he installed.
Gosselin: So on the tower for eddy covariance, in principle, there’s two main instruments: one instrument that measures the concentration of gas that we’re interested in in the air and [another] that uses infrared.
Bentley: Remember those greenhouse gas farts? This is how science “sniffs” them out.
Gosselin: So basically, we know, per volume, the amount of carbon dioxide or water vapor that’s in that parcel there. And we’re using ultrasound to measure it about 10 times a second—the speed of wind and the X, Y and Z direction. And then we do the covariance between the vertical movements of wind and the concentration of gas.
Bentley (tape): Do we have enough towers in the North to get an accurate picture?
Gosselin (tape): No, we do not. It’s incredibly difficult and costly to just get something out there. Just to go in those environments is really expensive. The biggest challenge that I found doing stuff out there is not necessarily the cold or, like, the mosquitoes or whatever. It’s getting enough power for all of those instruments that measure 24 hours a day, 10 times a second.
Bentley: Is tundra really that different that we need testing in all these different locations? How does it differ?
Gosselin (tape): You try to draw, like, not a paint-by-numbers but, you know, one of those little, and then you have to kind of draw a line.
Bentley (tape): Connect the dots!
Gosselin (tape): Yeah. But basically, you get an entire image with four points, and you have to draw an elephant. Like, it’s not going to look like an elephant. It’s going to look like a square.
So it’s the same thing. Like, you’re trying to get a detailed image of what, like, how different types of landscapes in the North behave. But if we only have four points, we’re going to be missing a lot of detail, and maybe some of the details are going to be important.
Bentley: How big of a problem is this? How worried should we be?
Gosselin: There’s been very little real sampling that’s been done. I don’t want to be alarmist. There’s always the kind of trap for scientists. They just go, “Well, I don’t know. I’m not qualified enough.” And then basically that’s taken, um, by the media saying, “Well, we’re not sure whether it’s a problem.”
Of course it’s concerning. Of course we have to do something. In fact, we’re past the point of no return. Things are going to happen. Things are warming up already beyond our control. And the consequences of that are happening now and are going to happen. By how much, I can’t say.
Bentley: Science, Quickly is produced by Jeffrey DelViscio, Tulika Bose and Kelso Harper. Our music was composed by Dominic Smith. Like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And for more science news, please go to ScientificAmerican.com.
This podcast was produced in partnership with Let's Talk Science.
Thanks for joining us for our Arctic series. I’m Joc Bentley, and this is Science, Quickly.
Funding for this story was provided in part by Let's Talk Science, a charitable organization that has provided engaging, evidence-based STEM programs for 30 years at no cost for Canadian youth and educators
LAUREN LEFFER: At the end of November, it’ll be one year since ChatGPT was first made public, rapidly accelerating the artificial intelligence arms race. And a lot has changed over the course of 10 months.
SOPHIE BUSHWICK: In just the past few weeks, both OpenAI and Google have introduced big new features to their AI chatbots.
LEFFER: And Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is jumping in the ring too, with its own public facing chatbots.
BUSHWICK: I mean, we learned about one of these news updates just minutes before recording this episode of Tech, Quickly, the version of Scientific American’s Science, Quickly podcast that keeps you updated on the lightning-fast advances in AI. I’m Sophie Bushwick, tech editor at Scientific American.
LEFFER: And I’m Lauren Leffer, tech reporting fellow.
[Clip: Show theme music]
BUSHWICK: So what are these new features these AI models are getting?
LEFFER: Let’s start with multimodality. Public versions of both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard can now interpret and respond to image and audio prompts, not just text. You can speak to the chatbots, kind of like the Siri feature on an iPhone, and get an AI-generated audio reply back. You can also feed the bots pictures, drawings or diagrams, and ask for information about those visuals, and get a text response.
BUSHWICK: That is awesome. How can people get access to this?
LEFFER: Google’s version is free to use, while OpenAI is currently limiting its new feature to premium subscribers who pay $20 per month.
BUSHWICK: And multimodality is a big change, right? When I say “large language model,” that used to mean text and text only.
LEFFER: Yeah, it’s a really good point. ChatGPT and Bard were initially built to parse and predict just text. We don’t know exactly what’s happened behind the scenes to get these multimodal models. But the basic idea is that these companies probably added together aspects of different AI models that they’ve built—say existing ones that auto-transcribe spoken language or generate descriptions of images—and then they used those tools to expand their text models into new frontiers.
BUSHWICK: So it sounds like behind the scenes we’ve got these sort of Frankenstein’s monster of models?
LEFFER: Sort of. It’s less Frankenstein, more kind of like Mr. Potato Head, in that you have the same basic body just with new bits added on. Same potato, new nose.
Once you add in new capacities to a text-based AI, then you can train your expanded model on mixed-media data, like photos paired with captions, and boost its ability to interpret images and spoken words. And the resulting AIs have some really neat applications.
BUSHWICK: Yeah, I’ve played around with the updated ChatGPT, and this ability to analyze photos really impressed me.
LEFFER: Yeah, I had both Bard and ChatGPT try to describe what type of person I am based on a photo of my bookshelf.
BUSHWICK: Oh my god, it’s the new internet personality test! So what does your AI book horoscope tell you?
LEFFER: So not to brag, but to be honest, both bots were pretty complimentary. (I have a lot of books.) But beyond my own ego, the book test demonstrates how people could use these tools to produce written interpretations of images, including inferred context. You know, this might be helpful for people with limited vision or other disabilities, and OpenAI actually tested their visual GPT-4 with blind users first.
BUSHWICK: That’s really cool. What are some other applications here?
LEFFER: Yeah, I mean, this sort of thing could be helpful for anyone—sighted or not—trying to understand a photo of something they’re unfamiliar with. Think, like, bird identification or repairing a car. In a totally different example, I also got ChatGPT to correctly split up a complicated bar tab from a photo of a receipt. It was way faster than I could’ve done the math, even with a calculator.
BUSHWICK: And when I was trying out ChatGPT, I took a photo of the view from my office window, asked ChatGPT what it was (which is the Statue of Liberty), and then asked it for directions. And it not only told me how to get the ferry, but gave me advice like “wear comfortable shoes.”
LEFFER: The directions thing was pretty wild.
BUSHWICK: It almost seemed like magic, but, of course…
LEFFER: It’s definitely not. It’s still just the result of lots and lots of training data, fed into a very big and complicated network of computer code. But even though it’s not a magic wand, multimodality is a really significant enough upgrade that might help OpenAI attract and retain users better than it has been. You know, despite all the new stories going around, fewer people have actually been using ChatGPT over the past three months. Usership dropped by about 10 percent for the first time in June, another 10 percent in July, and about 3 percent in August. The prevailing theory is that this has to do with summer break from school—but still losing users is losing users.
BUSHWICK: That makes sense. And this is also a problem for OpenAI, because it has all this competition. For instance, we have Google, which is keeping its own edge by taking its multimodal AI tool and putting it into a bunch of different products.
LEFFER: You mean like Gmail? Is Bard going to write all my emails from now on?
BUSHWICK: I mean, if you want it to. If you have a Gmail account, or even if you use YouTube or Google, if you have files stored in Google Drive, you can opt in and give Bard access to this individual account data. And then you can ask it to do things with that data, like find a specific video, summarize text from your emails, it can even offer specific location-based information. Basically, Google seems to be making Bard into an all-in-one digital assistant.
LEFFER: Digital assistant? That sounds kind of familiar. Is that at all related to the virtual chatbot pals that Meta is rolling out?
BUSHWICK: Sort of! Meta just announced it’s not introducing just one AI assistant, it’s introducing all these different AI personalities that you’re supposedly going to be able to interact with in Instagram or WhatsApp or its other products. The idea is it’s got one main AI assistant you can use, but you can also choose to interact with an AI that looks like Snoop Dogg and is supposedly modeled off specific personalities. You can also interact with an AI that has specialized function, like a travel agent.
LEFFER: When you're listing all of these different versions of an AI avatar you can interact with, the only thing my mind goes to is Clippy from the old school Microsoft Word. Is that basically what this is?
BUSHWICK: Sort of. You can have, like, a Mr. Beast Clippy, where when you're talking with it, it does—you know how Clippy kind of bounced and changed shape—these images of the avatars will sort of move as if they're actually participating in the conversation with you. I haven't gotten to try this out myself yet, but it does sound pretty freaky.
LEFFER: Okay, so we’ve got Mr. Beast. We’ve got Snoop Dogg. Anyone else?
BUSHWICK: Let's see, Paris Hilton comes to mind. And there's a whole slew of these. And I'm kind of interested to see whether people actually choose to interact with their favorite celebrity version or whether they choose the less anthropomorphized versions.
LEFFER: So these celebrity avatars, or whichever form you're going to be interacting with Meta’s AI in, is it also going to be able to access my Meta account data? I mean, there's like so much concern out there already about privacy and large language models. If there's a risk that these tools could regurgitate sensitive information from their training data or user interactions, why would I let Bard go through my emails or Meta read my Instagram DMs.
BUSHWICK: Privacy policies depend on the company. According to Google, it’s taken steps to ensure privacy for users who opt into the new integration feature. These steps include not training future versions of Bard on content from user emails or Google Docs, not allowing human reviewers to access users’ personal content, not selling the information to advertisers, and not storing all this data for long periods of time.
LEFFER: Okay, but what about Meta and its celebrity AI avatars?
BUSHWICK: Meta has said that, for now, it won’t use user content to train future versions of its AI.... But that might be coming soon. So privacy is still definitely a concern, and it goes beyond these companies. I mean, literal minutes before we started recording, we read the news that Amazon has announced it’s training a large language model on data that’s is going to include conversations recorded by Alexa.
LEFFER: So conversations that people have in their homes with their Alexa assistant.
BUSHWICK: Exactly.
LEFFER: That sounds so scary to me. I mean, in my mind, that's exactly what people have been afraid of with these home assistants for a long time: that they'd be listening, recording, and transmitting that data to somewhere that the person using it no longer has control over.
BUSHWICK: Yeah, anytime you let another service access information about you, you are opening up a new potential portal for leaks, and also for hacks.
LEFFER: It’s completely unsettling. I mean, do you think that the benefits of any of these AIs outweigh the risks?
BUSHWICK: So, it’s really hard to say right now. Google’s AI integration, multimodal chat bots, and, I mean, just these large language models in general, they are all still in such early experimental stages of development. I mean, they still make a lot of mistakes, and they don't quite measure up to more specialized tools that have been around for longer. But they can do a whole lot all in one place, which is super convenient, and that can be a big draw.
LEFFER: Right, so they’re definitely still not perfect, and one of those imperfections: they’re still prone to hallucinating incorrect information, correct?
BUSHWICK: Yes, and that brings me to one last question about AI before we wrap up: Do eggs melt?
LEFFER: Well, according to an AI-generated search result gone viral last week, they do.
BUSHWICK: Oh, no.
LEFFER: Yeah, a screenshot posted on social media showed Google displaying a top search snippet that claimed, “an egg can be melted,” and then it went on to give instructions on how you might melt an egg. Turns out, that snippet came from a Quora answer generated by ChatGPT and boosted by Google’s search algorithm. It’s more of that AI inaccuracy in action, exacerbated by search engine optimization—though at least this time around it was pretty funny, and not outright harmful.
BUSHWICK: But Google and Microsoft—they’re both working to incorporate AI-generated content into their search engines. But this melted egg misinformation struck me because it’s such a perfect example of why people are worried about that happening.
LEFFER: Mmm ... I think you mean eggs-ample.
BUSHWICK: Egg-zactly.
[Clip: Show theme music]
Science Quickly is produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose, Kelso Harper and Carin Leong. Our show is edited by Elah Feder and Alexa Lim. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.
LEFFER: Don’t forget to subscribe to Science, Quickly wherever you get your podcasts. For more in-depth science news and features, go to ScientificAmerican.com. And if you like the show, give us a rating or review!
BUSHWICK: For Scientific American’s Science, Quickly, I’m Sophie Bushwick.
Timmy Broderick: So I’m sitting inside this stone clock tower in the small town of Castellaro Lagusello in Italy. It’s pretty old, like 800 years old. I had found a nook in this tower where I could sit and record this ethereal music coming from the speaker in front of me. And through the slit of a window behind me, I could watch Italians mill about below.
Jason Drakeford: So Timmy, why are you being a recluse in this towerinstead of talking with people on the ground?
Broderick: [Laughs.] Well, it’s a fair question. I was gathering tape to be played on this podcast, but it was also my last day at the Universe in All Senses, it’s an astronomy festival. And I was pooped. For three days, I ran around this tiny, picturesque town capturing what was likely the first multisensory astronomy festival ever.
[CLIP: Music]
Broderick: Oh, does this sound familiar?
Drakeford: Yes! That’s Matt Russo’s TRAPPIST-1 sonification that we listened to in the first episode!
Broderick: Yeah! The festival organizers rigged up the clock tower to play a bunch of sonifications on a loop, and then at night, they’d project visualizations of these compositions onto the face of the clock tower.
[CLIP: Show theme music]
Drakeford: You are listening to Scientific American’s Science, Quickly. I’m Jason Drakeford.
Broderick: And I’m Timmy Broderick. In the prior episode of this three-part Fascination, we dove into the origins of turning space data into sound. In this final episode, we’re traveling to Italy to see whether astronomical sonifications can help people with disabilities better understand the awe and wonder of the cosmos.
Broderick [on tape]: Okay, so I’m walking around. Four thousand people at once is a lot…
Drakeford: Okay so how did you even hear about this festival?
Broderick: In January I wrote a story about this burgeoning movement in astronomy. One of my sources for that story was Anita Zanella. She’s an Italian astronomer who grew up playing with her relatives on the stone streets of Castellaro Lagusello. She told me about the festival.
Anita Zanella: Castellaro has a lot of historical buildings. The villa and the lake are typical ones. The other important point for this little village is the tower, which is really the key part, the heart, of the village.
Broderick: Castellaro has been holding an astronomy festival for a couple years now. But this is the first time it has really been multisensory. Every workshop, every talk, every event—all of them were available in at least two senses.
Zanella: Inclusion is the main focus this year. So being able to share the knowledge and the beauty of astronomy and the beauty of the universe with whoever, irrespective of disability and sensory limitations.
Broderick: They also had these giant QR code-like signs set up around the festival to help blind people navigate and understand a workshop or exhibit.
Drakeford: Uhuh.
Broderick: It was pretty wild. My phone picked up the code from like 10 feet away!
Drakeford: Woah, this is so cool!
[CLIP:Festival sound]
Broderick: Yeah. The highlight of the first evening was the keynote panel with Anita and two visually impaired astronomers, Nic Bonne and Enrique Pérez-Montero. You might remember Enrique from our last episode. The three of them discussed how to build a “multi-sensory discovery of the sky above us.”
[CLIP:Festival sound]
Broderick: After the discussion, I talked with Claudia Beschi. She’s 25, hails from nearby Mantova, wants to be a translator and just completed graduate school. She found the discussion fascinating. She’s also been blind since birth.
[CLIP: “The Bullet Cluster” by Matt Russo]
Claudia Beschi: I didn’t think it was possible to translate galaxies into sounds.... I felt like nature was talking to me.
I believe that nature has its own sounds. And listening to that sound, it was as if that galaxy was telling something to me. Like this galaxy was describing itself to me.
Drakeford: Woah. The galaxy was speaking to her. This is wild!
Broderick: Yeah, I was actually really moved by that conversation. It stuck with me throughout the festival.
And so the next day was the first, like, full day. There was a lot going on. We had a bunch of workshops happening. We had a radio wave scavenger hunt, we had comet smelling, there was crafting galaxies out of felt and other fabrics, and also last but definitely not least, banging pots and pans to represent stellar energies.
[CLIP: Pots and pans banging]
All of the workshops were staffed by local kids who could teach the attendees and especially the young kids. Elisa Zaltieri goes to high school in Mantova, and she ran the pots and pans station.
Zaltieri: It's an activity about how stars are actually different. We make child play pots actually.
Broderick (tape): So what are you gonna have these kids do?
Zaltieri: We have to make them recognize how stars are different and then we have to make them play, like, if they were stars.
We were trying to explain to them that [for] the biggest star, play the hardest. And the smallest, play lower, actually, because they have less energy.
Broderick (tape): So if you play really loudly, you'll have more energy; if you play really softly, you’ll have less energy?
Zaltieri: Yep!
[CLIP:Pots and pans banging]
Broderick: While the festival was ostensibly for kids, there were many workshops and events for adults.
Mattia Grella: I’m Mattia, 33, and I’m from Verona, quite close by.
Broderick: Mattia came to the festival for a couple of reasons. He knows one of the organizers, but he is also passionate about astronomy. He’s a hardcore Trekkie, as well. I met him at one of the workshops. He was creating a kind of patch made from different fabric textures. It was supposed to represent the different parts of a galaxy.
Grella: It’s smooth and kind of wavy, soft but not really smooth, kind of like the music we listened to before. It was a piece played on the piano. It was a soft piece, but played with the piano, it also had kind of a certain rhythm to it. So these little waves, at least to me, they represent this softness but also this movement.
Broderick: Mattia has been visually impaired since birth. His version of space is definitely not the inky, black expanse that you or I perceive it as.
Grella: I know the stars are classified like yellow dwarfs, red giants. And in my head, I imagined them quite with vivid colors, but I have no idea if they’re like basically white with a slight shade of yellow, red, or if they’re as vivid as I imagine them.
[CLIP: “SgrA Chandra” by Matt Russo]
Drakeford: So what did you think? Was the festival successful?
Broderick: To be honest, I’m not sure. It was definitely fun! Like, everyone I saw was having a great time and really engaged with astronomy. But I didn’t really see many people using those giant QR codes. I know that there was bus trouble that kept many local blind and partially sighted people from coming to Castellaro.
Drakeford: Were there a lot of visually impaired people there?
[CLIP: “The Galactic Center” by Matt Russo]
Broderick: I don’t know how many of the 4,000 attendees were blind or visually impaired. Neither do the festival organizers. That’s just unknowable. What I do know is that for the blind people I talked with — for Claudia, for Mattia — the festival and sonifications were really helpful. Claudia was there for one night, but she was thrilled by what she heard.
Beschi: I don’t know if I will see the world in a different way in the future, but I’m sure that this experience, in a way, taught something positive to me. Because I love nature. I think that nature speaks to us in every way possible. And these translations into sound and into tactile modes is a really good way to get in touch with nature, especially for us because we can’t, we can’t see how nature is really made of.
[CLIP: Outro music]
Broderick: Science, Quickly is produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose, Kelso Harper and Carin Leong. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Matt Russo provided the sonifications you heard in this episode.
Drakeford: Don’t forget to subscribe to Science, Quickly wherever you get your podcasts. For more in-depth science news and features, go to ScientificAmerican.com. And if you liked the show, give us a rating or review.
Broderick: For Scientific American’s Science, Quickly, I’m Timmy Broderick.
Drakeford: And I’m Jason Drakeford. See you next time!
Timmy Broderick: So I’m sitting inside this stone clock tower in the small town of Castellaro Lagusello in Italy. It’s pretty old, like 800 years old. I had found a nook in this tower where I could sit and record this ethereal music coming from the speaker in front of me. And through the slit of a window behind me, I could watch Italians mill about below.
Jason Drakeford: So Timmy, why are you being a recluse in this towerinstead of talking with people on the ground?
Broderick: [Laughs.] Well, it’s a fair question. I was gathering tape to be played on this podcast, but it was also my last day at the Universe in All Senses, it’s an astronomy festival. And I was pooped. For three days, I ran around this tiny, picturesque town capturing what was likely the first multisensory astronomy festival ever.
[CLIP: Music]
Broderick: Oh, does this sound familiar?
Drakeford: Yes! That’s Matt Russo’s TRAPPIST-1 sonification that we listened to in the first episode!
Broderick: Yeah! The festival organizers rigged up the clock tower to play a bunch of sonifications on a loop, and then at night, they’d project visualizations of these compositions onto the face of the clock tower.
[CLIP: Show theme music]
Drakeford: You are listening to Scientific American’s Science, Quickly. I’m Jason Drakeford.
Broderick: And I’m Timmy Broderick. In the prior episode of this three-part Fascination, we dove into the origins of turning space data into sound. In this final episode, we’re traveling to Italy to see whether astronomical sonifications can help people with disabilities better understand the awe and wonder of the cosmos.
Broderick [on tape]: Okay, so I’m walking around. Four thousand people at once is a lot…
Drakeford: Okay so how did you even hear about this festival?
Broderick: In January I wrote a story about this burgeoning movement in astronomy. One of my sources for that story was Anita Zanella. She’s an Italian astronomer who grew up playing with her relatives on the stone streets of Castellaro Lagusello. She told me about the festival.
Anita Zanella: Castellaro has a lot of historical buildings. The villa and the lake are typical ones. The other important point for this little village is the tower, which is really the key part, the heart, of the village.
Broderick: Castellaro has been holding an astronomy festival for a couple years now. But this is the first time it has really been multisensory. Every workshop, every talk, every event—all of them were available in at least two senses.
Zanella: Inclusion is the main focus this year. So being able to share the knowledge and the beauty of astronomy and the beauty of the universe with whoever, irrespective of disability and sensory limitations.
Broderick: They also had these giant QR code-like signs set up around the festival to help blind people navigate and understand a workshop or exhibit.
Drakeford: Uhuh.
Broderick: It was pretty wild. My phone picked up the code from like 10 feet away!
Drakeford: Woah, this is so cool!
[CLIP:Festival sound]
Broderick: Yeah. The highlight of the first evening was the keynote panel with Anita and two visually impaired astronomers, Nic Bonne and Enrique Pérez-Montero. You might remember Enrique from our last episode. The three of them discussed how to build a “multi-sensory discovery of the sky above us.”
[CLIP:Festival sound]
Broderick: After the discussion, I talked with Claudia Beschi. She’s 25, hails from nearby Mantova, wants to be a translator and just completed graduate school. She found the discussion fascinating. She’s also been blind since birth.
[CLIP: “The Bullet Cluster” by Matt Russo]
Claudia Beschi: I didn’t think it was possible to translate galaxies into sounds.... I felt like nature was talking to me.
I believe that nature has its own sounds. And listening to that sound, it was as if that galaxy was telling something to me. Like this galaxy was describing itself to me.
Drakeford: Woah. The galaxy was speaking to her. This is wild!
Broderick: Yeah, I was actually really moved by that conversation. It stuck with me throughout the festival.
And so the next day was the first, like, full day. There was a lot going on. We had a bunch of workshops happening. We had a radio wave scavenger hunt, we had comet smelling, there was crafting galaxies out of felt and other fabrics, and also last but definitely not least, banging pots and pans to represent stellar energies.
[CLIP: Pots and pans banging]
All of the workshops were staffed by local kids who could teach the attendees and especially the young kids. Elisa Zaltieri goes to high school in Mantova, and she ran the pots and pans station.
Zaltieri: It's an activity about how stars are actually different. We make child play pots actually.
Broderick (tape): So what are you gonna have these kids do?
Zaltieri: We have to make them recognize how stars are different and then we have to make them play, like, if they were stars.
We were trying to explain to them that [for] the biggest star, play the hardest. And the smallest, play lower, actually, because they have less energy.
Broderick (tape): So if you play really loudly, you'll have more energy; if you play really softly, you’ll have less energy?
Zaltieri: Yep!
[CLIP:Pots and pans banging]
Broderick: While the festival was ostensibly for kids, there were many workshops and events for adults.
Mattia Grella: I’m Mattia, 33, and I’m from Verona, quite close by.
Broderick: Mattia came to the festival for a couple of reasons. He knows one of the organizers, but he is also passionate about astronomy. He’s a hardcore Trekkie, as well. I met him at one of the workshops. He was creating a kind of patch made from different fabric textures. It was supposed to represent the different parts of a galaxy.
Grella: It’s smooth and kind of wavy, soft but not really smooth, kind of like the music we listened to before. It was a piece played on the piano. It was a soft piece, but played with the piano, it also had kind of a certain rhythm to it. So these little waves, at least to me, they represent this softness but also this movement.
Broderick: Mattia has been visually impaired since birth. His version of space is definitely not the inky, black expanse that you or I perceive it as.
Grella: I know the stars are classified like yellow dwarfs, red giants. And in my head, I imagined them quite with vivid colors, but I have no idea if they’re like basically white with a slight shade of yellow, red, or if they’re as vivid as I imagine them.
[CLIP: “SgrA Chandra” by Matt Russo]
Drakeford: So what did you think? Was the festival successful?
Broderick: To be honest, I’m not sure. It was definitely fun! Like, everyone I saw was having a great time and really engaged with astronomy. But I didn’t really see many people using those giant QR codes. I know that there was bus trouble that kept many local blind and partially sighted people from coming to Castellaro.
Drakeford: Were there a lot of visually impaired people there?
[CLIP: “The Galactic Center” by Matt Russo]
Broderick: I don’t know how many of the 4,000 attendees were blind or visually impaired. Neither do the festival organizers. That’s just unknowable. What I do know is that for the blind people I talked with — for Claudia, for Mattia — the festival and sonifications were really helpful. Claudia was there for one night, but she was thrilled by what she heard.
Beschi: I don’t know if I will see the world in a different way in the future, but I’m sure that this experience, in a way, taught something positive to me. Because I love nature. I think that nature speaks to us in every way possible. And these translations into sound and into tactile modes is a really good way to get in touch with nature, especially for us because we can’t, we can’t see how nature is really made of.
[CLIP: Outro music]
Broderick: Science, Quickly is produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose, Kelso Harper and Carin Leong. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Matt Russo provided the sonifications you heard in this episode.
Drakeford: Don’t forget to subscribe to Science, Quickly wherever you get your podcasts. For more in-depth science news and features, go to ScientificAmerican.com. And if you liked the show, give us a rating or review.
Broderick: For Scientific American’s Science, Quickly, I’m Timmy Broderick.
Drakeford: And I’m Jason Drakeford. See you next time!
[CLIP: Wanda Díaz-Merced speaks in a TED Talk: “ Once there was a star.... Just like everything in life, she reached the end of her regular star days, when her heart, the core of her life, exhausted its fuel. But that was no end. She transformed into a supernova, and in the process, releasing a tremendous amount of energy. ”]
Timmy Broderick: Okay, Jason, who and what am I listening to?
Jason Drakeford: This is Wanda Díaz-Merced. She is a blind astronomer and a pioneer in astronomical sonification. This is a TED Talk she gave about the massive explosions that stars release when they die. She has done a lot of work capturing these gamma-ray bursts using sound rather than sight.
Broderick: Oh, so she’s, like, the OG of astronomical sonification. Like, all of this, this entire series we’re doing, stems from her and her work.
Drakeford: Yeah, exactly!
[CLIP: Science, Quickly, intro music]
[CLIP: “Flaring Blazar” by Matt Russo]
Drakeford: You are listening to Scientific American’s Science, Quickly. I’m Jason Drakeford.
Broderick: And I’m Timmy Broderick. In the previous episode of this three-part Fascination, we introduced you to scientists and musicians who are turning comets and galaxies and other stellar goodies into fascinating compositions. Today we’re telling you about the origins of this nascent field.
Drakeford: So, Wanda ...
Broderick: Yeah?
Drakeford: I talked with her earlier this year.
Díaz-Merced: I’m in Paris, working at the Astroparticle and Cosmology Lab at the University of Paris that is part of an institution called CERN [the European laboratory for particle physics near Geneva], and I’m here in the lab.
Drakeford: Yeah, that’s Wanda. She works at the most famous particle accelerators in the world. But for all that she’s accomplished, she’s quite humble. Growing up in Puerto Rico, Wanda had a passion for science.
Díaz-Merced: I always wanted to become a scientist. But to me, the only scientists in the universe were medicine doctors. Studying science meant that you would become a doctor.
Drakeford: Wanda was diagnosed with diabetes pretty early in childhood and then later with diabetic retinopathy. This can cause blindness in people with diabetes. So when she was in her early 20s in college, her vision started to go.
Díaz-Merced: The condition continued deteriorating until the point when I couldn’t orientate anymore. I needed help. I used to, like, stay in one place all day and not move from there. Already I was using a cane.
Drakeford: For most of Wanda’s undergraduate years, she was focused on being a doctor, even though she was losing her sight—until one day when her friend brought her into his backyard, where he had a small radio telescope as part of NASA’s Radio JOVE project.
Díaz-Merced: This is like an antenna that looks like the wires for you to hang your clothes when you wash your clothes in the summer. So just imagine that but made of copper wires and a little bit fancier.
Drakeford: Radio telescopes can detect radio emissions from several astronomical bodies, such as the sun or Jupiter—which is a very fancy way of saying that Jupiter has radio storms, and we can literally hear them. Like, Jupiter has naturally occurring lasers near its poles that beam radio waves into space. Which is wild! And sometimes we catch them here on Earth.
Díaz-Merced: At first I said, “Emilio, why are you listening to that?” because I thought it was an AM radio. And then he said, “No, no, no, Wandita. That is waiting to see if there is any solar emissions.” And then he says that my eyes got big! Like, my, my face changed.
And I, yes—I heard it! Yes, yes!
It was this sense of possibility at that very moment. Then, at some point, he had to say, “Wanda, you have to go to your house. You cannot stay here until tomorrow just sitting by that thing, listening to it.” I didn’t want to detach from it. I began pondering, “What would it be to listen to the data?”
Drakeford: Hearing these Jovian emissions pushed Wanda into astronomy. She worked with the Radio JOVE project, made her way to NASA and completed a Ph.D. Using sonifications, she has even made discoveries that sighted astronomers have missed.
[CLIP: Wanda's sonification of supernova explosions]
Wanda found that star formation can affect supernovae, which suggests that these explosions are not only dependent on the mass of their host star. Converting the data into sound helped uncover the drop in volume that led to the discovery.
Díaz-Merced: How do I say, I discovered my ability to listen to the data, to listen to, as you call it—I love the way you call it—to listen to the universe, to the phenomena that have been seen in the interstellar medium.
There’s no textbooks available for us. A textbook in astrophysics is like gold dust. It’s like a diamond. It’s like platinum, a yellow diamond this size of my fist.
The scientific revolution developed in a way that just assumed that we wouldn’t participate. It just developed in a way until it got to the point that we had no ways. When I began, I didn’t have any tools to do, perform in the field, no tools, nothing.
Broderick: Her work has inspired other blind astronomers, too.
Enrique Pérez-Montero: My name is Enrique Pérez-Montero. I have two names because, you know, in Spain, we have two names.
Broderick: Enrique is an astrophysicist at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Spain. He was not born blind, but a disease called retinitis pigmentosa has made his vision progressively cloudier. He could still see when he finished his Ph.D. But now in his 40s, he continues to study the chemical compositions of the brightest galaxies. His workflow has changed, however.
Pérez-Montero: Ten or 15 years ago, I was able to see them directly in observatories and see the spectra of the universe. And at the moment I am able to deal with the numbers of data [that] telescopes take—just listening, in my computer, these numbers.
Broderick: By using his computer to read out these data aloud, Enrique is able to lead a pretty normal life as an astrophysicist. But it’s clear the field doesn’t know how to react to his disability. Their discomfort is clear whenever Enrique goes to a scientific conference, and other scientists see his guide dog, Rocco.
Pérez-Montero: Even though they are thought to be very intelligent because of the number of papers of contributions or the relationships in projects, they are shocked before the idea that you are blind and that you are an astronomer.
Broderick: Enrique’s disability even helps him analyze data without bias. Other astronomers are ...
Pérez-Montero: Distracted by the beauty of the images. They can get wrong conclusions, maybe because they are just seeing an image. And they are not objectively analyzing what’s the content of the information. And this is one thing I can do because I’m just simply listening: What is the trend of the data, of the very simple cold data, read by my computer?
Broderick: How we choose to represent data can have far-reaching consequences. Astronomy has been associated with sight for centuries, but that does not mean the sense is necessary or even the most useful tool to do the job. It’s ultimately arbitrary, Enrique says.
Pérez-Montero: Ninety-nine percent of the energy and the matter of the universe cannot be seen at all. We can see them because people working with simulations [are] putting out this stuff about dark matter and dark energy. But, of course, this cannot be seen at all, and we can translate it to other ways than images. Images are not the main source to get information about what is the true nature of our universe.
[CLIP: Outro music]
Broderick: In the next and final episode of this series, we head overseas, where a multisensory astronomy festival takes over a small Italian town. Astronomical sonification is a very cool concept—but can it actually inspire people?
Claudia Beschi: I believe that nature has its own sounds. And listening to that sound was as if that galaxy was telling something to me. So it was like this galaxy was describing itself to me.
Drakeford: Science, Quickly is produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose, Kelso Harper and Carin Leong. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Wanda Diaz-Merced and Matt Russo provided the sonifications you heard in this episode.
Broderick: Don’t forget to subscribe to Science, Quickly wherever you get your podcasts. For more in-depth science news and features, go to ScientificAmerican.com. And if you liked the show, give us a rating or review.
Drakeford: For Scientific American’s Science, Quickly, I’m Jason Drakeford.
Broderick: And I’m Timmy Broderick. See you next time!
Jason Drakeford: It’s 2016, and we’re in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. A live orchestra and choir perform opera music while thousands of people press tiny cardboard boxes to their faces. This is the Hubble Cantata.
Timmy Broderick: Yeah, so these virtual reality headsets are pretty jank, but the scenes the audience is looking at through them are majestic. It’s a 360-degree view of some of the most stunning galaxies that astronomers have ever captured. Meanwhile sweeping classical music that matches the images just envelops the audience.
[CLIP: show theme music]
Broderick: Alright, well. Whoosh whoosh whoosh — Hubble Cantata – whoosh whoosh whoosh. Jason, like, bring us in.
Jason: [laughs] Okay, let’s do it. Are you ready?
Drakeford: You are listening to Scientific American’s Science, Quickly. I’m Jason Drakeford. I’m an animator and video journalist.
Broderick: And I’m Timmy Broderick. I’m a freelance journalist who covers disability and a recent intern at SciAm.
[CLIP: “5K Exoplanets” by Matt Russo]
Broderick: This week we’re taking over the feed and blasting off into space. We’re going to take you on a journey through the stars.
Drakeford: Welcome to part one of a three-part Fascination on how scientists and artists are turning space into sound. You’ve seen photographs from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescope. Now, get ready to hear them, including one brand-new sonification that has never been publicly released.
Broderick: But to get to the stars, we need to start somewhere a little bit closer to home.
Paola Prestini: What we did in the park was essentially create, like, an eight-point loudspeaker system so that people in the park could feel like they were traveling through space in this kind of completely enveloped sound. To essentially take you, as a viewer, were suspended in space, with Earth at your toes, going through this incredible journey, finally, through the Orion Nebula.
Drakeford: This is Paola Prestini, she’s an award-winning composer who has collaborated with poets, and artists, and scientists. She also likes to say she “paints with data.”
Prestini: My training is obviously in composition. I like to say that I’m essentially an explorer, and I do that mainly through sound.
Broderick: Prestini isn’t the only one turning astronomical data into sound. Other artists and scientists are using markers such as orbital paths and star brightness to craft their own symphonies. It’s led to the birth of a new field: astronomical sonification.
Prestini: There’s this idea that there’s no sound in space because we can’t hear them. In fact, there’s been incredible explorations, most recently with black holes and pitching the [gravitational] waves up so that we can actually hear them with human ears.
Drakeford: Astronomy has always been a visual science, but data doesn’t care how it’s presented. Scientists have just been defaulting to images. And that’s changing now.
Broderick: Yeah. Turning astronomical data into sound is not just cool, these soundscapes can also inspire folks who are blind and visually impaired, in the same way that you or I, Jason, you know, are inspired by those images from Hubble and the JWST. And also, these sounds might lead to some discoveries, too.
To get there, the field is going to need to be more formalized. Should a bright star lead to a low pitch or a high pitch? Is a cello or an oboe a better instrument to capture a comet’s path? Right now there’s no standardization.
Prestini: In terms of sonification, and as composers, we kind of make up these rules.
Drakeford: Timmy, what the hell even is a sonification?
Broderick: Right, so a sonification is exactly what it “sounds” like. It’s turning data into sound. You can sonify the stock market by making a piano’s note correspond to the nightly closing stock number.
Broderick: In both of these clips, you can hear the data pretty clearly. What Paola is doing is a little different. The notes, dynamics and instrumentation of the Hubble Cantata don’t map exactly to the stars or galaxies that people saw in the VR simulation.
[CLIP: Hubble Cantata]
Paola was more inspired by the images. But other scientists are doing that one-to-one mapping.
[CLIP: “TRAPPIST sounds” by Matt Russo]
Drakeford: What you’re hearing right now is a sonification of planetary orbits from astrophysicist Matt Russo.
Broderick: The piece captures data from 40 light-years away in the TRAPPIST-1 system.
Drakeford: Seven rocky planets orbit TRAPPIST-1. And each time a planet passes in front of the star, it blocks a little bit of light.
Broderick: The notes you’re hearing are planets completing their orbit. This is an “orbital frequency.” Matt multiplied each planet’s frequency and turned these stellar passages into specific musical notes. He then stacked the frequencies, added drums for when neighboring planets passed one another, and voilà.
Russo: When I saw the pattern in their orbits, I could quickly calculate which notes those correspond to, and I knew would be a really, like pleasing, beautiful chord altogether.
Drakeford: Matt is a physics professor at the University of Toronto, as well as a musician and a data sonification specialist. When he was growing up, he loved both music and astronomy but he couldn’t find a way to marry the two passions.
Russo: As I grew older, it became actually a source of conflict because everyone told me I had to pick one or the other. I kept these two worlds in parallel, knowing they would eventually crash at some point and explode, or I don’t know what was going to happen.
Broderick: This “crash” has produced some pretty spectacular work. Matt’s sonifications have been heard across the world. Probably his most famous sonification is the clip you just heard.
Russo: We had to give the system a voice. It’s not actually making any sound, but we can still hear the rhythm and harmony of this faraway solar system.
Drakeford: Matt released this sonification in 2017 with astrophysicist Dan Tamayo and musician Andrew Santaguida. The response was overwhelming. The video got a ton of press and was written about in places such as the New York Times and Gizmodo.
Russo: It’s always just overwhelming how much people connect with the sounds that we’ve created [out] of these images. So it’s an art form, but in the process, they are learning something about the astronomical system and also just about information and how you can experience the same information using two different senses.
Broderick: In the years since, Matt has gone on to create more sonifications and work with NASA, like this one of a black hole.
[CLIP: “M87 Jets” by Matt Russo]
If you want to join the fun and see Matt’s very cute dog, he has a series explaining how to make your own sonifications.
Drakeford: But these sonifications are more than just a musical exercise or vanity project for Russo. He started the SYSTEM Sounds outreach project with Dan and Andrew to make sonifications.
Russo: We wanted to be able to convert astronomical images into sound, partially because we thought it was interesting and fun but also to make those images accessible to people that don’t have sight, people who are blind or visually impaired.
Broderick: Russo’s not the only one pushing for this. Astronomical sonification was started by a blind astronomer. We’ll have more about that story in our next episode, but this was always the goal: expand our understanding of the stars—especially for people with disabilities.
Drakeford: Before we go, let’s listen to an excerpt from a never-before-heard sonification of gravitational waves that Matt and Andrew made. Gravitational waves ripple across the fabric of space time thanks to big energy events, like a colliding black hole. These waves clue astronomers in to the structure and composition of the universe. Matt wanted to capture this.
[CLIP: “Gravitational Waves” by Matt Russo and Andrew Santaguida]
[CLIP: Outro music]
Broderick: Next episode, we’ll be digging into the origins of astronomical sonification and why sound can be just as useful as sight to understand space.
Wanda Díaz-Merced: And I yes— and I heard it! Yes, yes!
Drakeford: Science, Quickly is produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose, Kelso Harper and Carin Leong. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.
Broderick: Matt Russo and the open-source website TwoTone provided the sonifications you heard in this episode. Don’t forget to subscribe to Science, Quickly wherever you get your podcasts. For more in-depth science news and features, go to ScientificAmerican.com. And if you liked the show, give us a rating or review.
Drakeford: For Scientific American’s Science, Quickly, I’m Jason Drakeford.
Broderick: And I’m Timmy Broderick. See you next time!
[CLIP: Radio chatter, engine revving and taking off, plane sounds]
Daniel Grossman: Climate researcher Luciana Gatti stares grimly out of an oval porthole.
I’m sitting next to her in a single-engine prop plane. We climb into the sky above the eastern Amazon in Brazil. She motions toward the ground below us.
Luciana Gatti: You see? Recent deforestation here. Grossman (tape): Oh! Right there. Right there. Gatti: Yeah.
Grossman: Luciana works at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. She started coming here two decades ago. She says that back then, the land we’re looking down on was completely blanketed in green: the crowns of millions of trees, intertwined.
The few subsistence farms that interrupted this green ocean only seemed to prove how vast the jungle was.
Today all we see through the plane’s window glass are brown and green jigsaw puzzle pieces alternating between newly cleared jungle, grain crops and the remains of recent harvests.
Gatti: They are killing the forest to transform everything into soybeans.
Grossman: I’m Daniel Grossman, reporting for Science, Quickly.
I’ve come to the Amazon to find out what Luciana is learning about the health of the forest and its role in influencing the rate of climate change.
And the plane we’re on isn’t just used for taking in the view. It’s part of Luciana’s science. She hires this plane and others like it to collect air above the changing forest—because mixed in with that air is a key to climate change: carbon dioxide.
Here’s a little background: 30 percent of the carbon dioxide released globally by burning fossil fuel gets absorbed in soil and vegetation, probably mostly in forests.
That forest uptake slows the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and slows global warming. And when crops replace that forest, carbon uptake declines.
Gatti: In our studies, we observed [a] 70 percent increase in soybean plantation area.
Grossman: Scientists believe that the Amazon soaks up a major share of global forest uptake. But deforestation is taking its toll on the Amazon and weakening this essential carbon sink.
Just last year loggers in Brazil cleared an area nearly the size of Connecticut. Most of that forest loss happened in the region we’re flying over right now.
Gatti: Look at this. This is a soybean ocean.
Grossman: Though she has studied the Amazon forest for decades, Luciana rarely gets an aerial tour such as this one. Usually the pilots she hires fly solo to collect the air samples she needs for her studies of carbon uptake.
[CLIP: Airplane noise ends, and echoey hangar SFX comes up]
Grossman: It’s quieter once we’ve landed and taxied into this big hangar.
[CLIP: Equipment case clasps snapping]
Luciana brings over a sturdy plastic suitcase that she stores in a small office and opens it.
Gatti: Here is the front.
Grossman: Packed in foam inside the case are 12 glistening glass containers—she calls them flasks—each the size of a one-quart soft drink bottle.
Gatti: This is the inlet.
Grossman: With a flourish, Luciana traces the path air takes from a nozzle mounted on the plane’s fuselage through a web of tubing and valves into the bottles.
Gatti: We have a pump that pushes there through this unit that has the flasks.
Grossman: Getting her air isn’t exactly easy or fast. Luciana has to hire pilots at four landing strips. First, they climb to an altitude of 14,500 feet above a landmark that she’s specified. Then they push a button on their control panel, which starts up the pump that fills the first flask. Next, they dive steeply down in a tight spiral, keeping the landmark in the center.
Gatti: The first sample is 14,500 feet. The next is 13,000 feet. When he is at the correct height, he just presses the button, and then the system is started. And then he goes to the next sample ...
Grossman: At 11,500 feet.
Gatti: He just push the button and start the next sample.
Grossman: They circle down until they’re practically buzzing the ground and have filled all 12 flasks.
Gatti: And then he can return ...
Grossman: Where he packs up the suitcase in a padded box and ships it to Luciana at the Institute for Space Research near São Paulo.
Gatti: And then it goes to the laboratory ...
Grossman: Where Luciana measures the carbon dioxide concentration in the flasks.
The dive-bomb sampling is worth the effort. What she gets out of her atmospheric samples is an exquisite vertical profile of changing CO2 over the forest..., and it really does change with height and time.
That’s because plants trap carbon dioxide by photosynthesis, and soil microbes emit it by the process of respiration.
The difference between this absorption and emission is the forest’s net intake or release of carbon dioxide. Air closest to the ground is the most influenced by what’s going on in the forest. And Luciana teases out what the forest is doing by comparing results from the highest to the lowest altitude.
Gatti: If the concentration go increasing, this can mean that the surface is a source. If it goes decreasing, it means the surface is trapping.
Grossman: Luciana’s pilots have gathered air twice a month for years from each of the Amazon’s four corners. Atmospheric scientist Scott Denning says it’s a heroic logistic feat. He sometimes collaborates with Luciana.
Scott Denning: The beauty of Luciana’s work, and also the difficulty of her work, is that she’s done it over and over again for 10 years.
Grossman (tape): Was that pretty tough?
Gatti: Yes. Yes. Because always have problem with the pilot [or] with the company. For example, the northwest site, we are in the third company. The first had only one airplane. This airplane crashed.
Grossman: That’s right. It crashed. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. Luciana had flasks delayed, sent to the wrong address and stolen.
But these headaches are trivial, considering the valuable information the atmospheric measurements provide, she says.
Other researchers monitor the Amazon with other methods, such as by measuring trees in small research plots. But these can only tell what’s going on in specific spots, and the megadiverse Amazon does not behave the same everywhere.
Gatti: It's really very hard to study the Amazon. It’s very big. We don’t have the people enough to do all the studies necessary. We don’t have the money enough. With the aircraft, it’s much less expensive. We can go everywhere and get the information. We can get many answers.
Grossman: And what answers has she gotten? Luciana drives me an hour to the Tapajós National Forest to show me.
[CLIP: Slamming car door; walking on path]
Grossman: Luciana and I hike past colonnades of towering trunks topped with crowns that shade out all but a small bit of the sunlight.
Gatti: This is the tower. This is 45 meters high.
Grossman: That’s about 148 feet. And I’m about to find out how high that actually is.
Gatti: When we are in the top, we are in the same level of the end of the canopy. Let’s go?
Grossman: We trudge up the tower’s metal staircase.
[CLIP: Walking up tower]
About 12 stories above the ground, we pass into blazing sunlight and a spectacular view.
Gatti: Amazing. This is like a parazita. What’s parazita?
Jocelyn (tape): Paradise.
Grossman: A colleague of Luciana’s, visiting from New Zealand, briefly serves as translator. It’s a paradise up here, she says.
An undulating plain of leaves sparkles in the glare spread out below us to the horizon. To me, this parazita seems to be thriving. But Luciana says it’s not.
Gatti: The forest is preserved in the sense that nobody here come cut. But the trees are dying.
Grossman: In 2021 Luciana published results from 590 plane flights in nine years showing that here, and in most of the rest of the Amazon, the carbon sink is seriously waning.
And in the southeastern Amazon, her air samples showed that the forest is now releasing—not absorbing—carbon dioxide.
Gatti: In the southeast part, there we don’t see more sink. We see only source. The Amazon now is a source.
Grossman: That’s right. The southeastern Amazon forest is a source, just like a smokestack. Climate change is part of the reason for these surprising results, especially in the southeastern region, the part of the Amazon that is most affected.
Carlos Nobre, a colleague of Luciana’s, says that the dry season, which is always the most stressful time for the forest, is becoming intolerable for trees across the southern Amazon.
Carlos Nobre: I consider that to be one of the most serious climate data that you can see anywhere in the world.
Grossman: Carlos is a climate scientist at the University of São Paulo. He says that in the southern Amazon, the dry season has become a month longer. The amount of rain that falls then has declined by 20 to 25 percent.
Nobre: The tropical forest evolved over millions of years with a lot of rainfall and then a very short dry season—three to four months, maximum. It’s now four to five months. And if the rainfall exceeds five to six months, there is no way to keep the forest.
Grossman: On top of that, dry season temperatures have gone way up. In the southeast they’ve increased by 2.5 degrees Celsius, or nearly five degrees Fahrenheit, in the past four decades.
Nobre: All these elements combined are leading to increasing tree mortality.
Grossman: Rampant deforestation makes the situation even worse. Forest is being felled all over the Amazon. But the northeast, where Luciana took me on the aerial tour, has been hit the hardest.
Thirty-seven percent of original forest has been removed. Recent studies show that deforestation weakens nearby jungle that is otherwise untouched. Clear-cuts make neighboring intact forest hotter and drier, undermining its health. Forests are also more likely to burn when fire escapes from clear-cuts that have been turned into farms.
Carlos says that unless climate change and deforestation are halted, a lot of the southern Amazon will soon be inhospitable to the trees that currently live there. Even trees that now grow in the much less lush savanna elsewhere in Brazil will find today’s Amazon region too hot and dry.
Nobre: All of southern Amazon is becoming very close to turning into open-canopy degraded ecosystem.
Grossman: This ecosystem would store much less carbon. Billions of tons of carbon dioxide would be released in the transformation. And the damage could spread like a cancer because the eastern forest is critical for the rest of the Amazon.
Moisture blows in from the Atlantic and falls as rain first in the east. Trees actually return much of this moisture to the atmosphere, which then blows farther west and falls again. This water recycling process happens over and over, moving critical wetness west. A degraded eastern forest could break this east-to-west rain chain.
Nobre: This is really very dangerous.
Grossman: Carlos’s computer simulations predict that if only a little bit more forest is removed and global climate change warms the planet another 2.5 degrees C, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the Amazon will pass a tipping point.
And then most of the Amazon would become open-canopy degraded forest, which would devastate the current forest’s wildlife and rev up global warming. And this could happen in a few decades.
Nobre: The Amazon is at the edge of this tipping point. We have to stop deforestation immediately.
Grossman: Luciana tears up just thinking about the worrisome future of the forest that she’s spent her career studying …
Gatti: This is what scares me terrible. This [is] why it’s affecting me so much in times when I come because I’m observing the forest dying.
Grossman:Science, Quickly is produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose and Kelso Harper.
This story was produced with assistance from the Pulitzer Center.
Don’t forget to subscribe to Science, Quickly. And for more in-depth science news, visit ScientificAmerican.com.
Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.
For Scientific American’s Science, Quickly, I’m Daniel Grossman.
Tanya Lewis: Hi, this is Your Health, Quickly, a Scientific American podcast series!
Josh Fischman: We bring you the latest vital health news: Discoveries that affect your body and your mind.
Lewis: And we break down the medical research to help you stay healthy.
I’m Tanya Lewis.
Fischman: I’m Josh Fischman.
Lewis: We’re Scientific American’s senior health editors.
Today, we’re talking about a bunch of new blood tests for Alzheimer’s disease. They’re a lot easier than existing diagnostics—but they may not always indicate disease. And some doctors warn that there are still a lot of questions about treatment.
[Clip: Show theme music]
Fischman: So… Alzheimer’s. About six million people in U.S. are afflicted by this type of dementia. It is a thief of minds, a destroyer of memories, and it’s a killer with no cure. I’ve known people who’ve had it, and it’s scary to see what it does. How about you?
Lewis: I've also known someone close to me who has Alzheimer's, and it is a really devastating disease.
I mean, it really takes away a sense of your identity and self, and really a part of your personality, to have this disease. So it’s hard to watch somebody go through that.
Fischman: Yeah, that thing that you said about like losing your identity, losing your memories of yourself and of the people around you is just a devastating thing.
And you also lose the ability to, to take care of yourself, to wash yourself, to cook, to bathe, to do all of these things that you’ve done for your entire life. They’ve suddenly become this thing like a puzzle you can’t solve.
Lewis: But there are finally some new treatments.
One of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s, physically, is a buildup of this warped protein, amyloid-beta, in the brain. And there are two drugs, Aduhelm and Leqembi, that are designed to clear out these amyloid clumps.
Fischman: Saying amyloid is a hallmark, though, is different than saying it's a cause. There's been a really long debate over causes, and it's not over. There could be other toxic proteins or lost connections among brain cells that actually cause the disease.
Lewis: Right. It could even be a combination of all those things.
But recently, tests with Leqembi suggested that the amyloid-clearing drug slowed down mental decline for several months. So the drug both cleans up amyloid and may help with cognitive problems, at least for a little while.
Fischman: Right. Now, because there are amyloid-focused treatments— even if they’re not super effective—companies are rushing to bring out diagnostic tests to tell you if you have abnormal amyloid in your brain. Two of the newest look for fragments of these amyloid proteins in your blood.
Lewis: Simple blood tests sound pretty good. So how accurate are they?
Fischman: Turns out they’re good, at least at connecting what’s in your blood to what’s in your brain. Amyloid starts in your brain, and some drifts down your spine in your cerebrospinal fluid. From there a little tiny bit leaks out into your blood.
One test, called Precivity AD, can detect the proteins with 93 percent accuracy, according to one study. Another test, AD Detect, just launched by the big national diagnostic lab Quest, does it at close to the same rate. That’s compared to the gold standards in Alzheimer’s diagnostic tests.
Lewis: And those gold standard tests are a lot more complicated to do. One is a lumbar puncture of the spine, using a needle to draw out spinal fluid. The other is a brain scan called PET that uses a special dye to highlight clumps of amyloid in your brain.
Fischman: Those are the two best at finding amyloid. Though doctors will more often start a diagnosis by giving people sophisticated memory tests.
Zaldy Tan: Obtaining a thorough medical history, performing a physical neurologic exam, getting labs, neuroimaging, typically that is how we had diagnosed Alzheimer's disease.
Fischman: That is Alzheimer’s expert Zaldy Tan.
Tan: I'm a memory disorder specialist as well as medical director of the Yona Goldbridge Center for Alzheimer's disease at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California.
Lewis: Did Tan mention why doctors want blood tests if they already have these lumbar punctures that work well?
Fischman: As a matter of fact, he did.
Tan: First of all, patients don't like it very much when you do that. It involves, you know, a pretty long needle that.. you have to stick in someone's back and get a sample.
Lewis: Ouch! That sounds painful.
Fischman: No kidding. And as for the PET scans, there are not a lot of places around the country that do them, so there’s a long wait. Plus they’re expensive and insurance may not cover them.
Lewis: I can see why a blood test would be more convenient.
So the idea is that if tests show you have brain amyloid, you could take drugs that help, right?
Fischman: Right.
Lewis: I sense there’s a “but” coming...
Fischman: Yep. And here it is.
Tan: We don't routinely look for amyloid in the workup for someone with memory issues because there's a subset of individuals who will get amyloid positivity without having disease.
Lewis: So what he’s saying is, tests for amyloid can be positive, but people can still be fine mentally?
Fischman: Exactly. He went into more detail.
Tan: There is a study that’s almost 10 years old now, where they followed close to 3,000 individuals. And what they found was that people who are age 50, who don’t have memory issues, even in formal testing, 10 percent of them will be amyloid positive. And if you look at people who are 90 years old, about 45–50 percent of them will be amyloid positive. Again, these are people who do not have memory issues and therefore do not have dementia.
Lewis: Wow, I’d heard that, but I didn’t realize it was that widespread. So these new blood tests can detect amyloid, but they don’t necessarily mean you’re going to get Alzheimer’s.
Fischman: Right. And they’re not cheap. The Quest test—which people can order for themselves—costs $400. And insurance isn’t going to cover it.
And here’s another thing. The tests aren’t FDA approved for diagnosing Alzheimer’s. It’s legal to put tests like these onto the market for measuring substances in the blood, but not to say that you have or don’t have a disease.
Lewis: That’s an important difference. So say a healthy person takes one of these blood tests, and it says they have high levels of amyloid. Has Tan ever had a patient like that?
Tan: Not yet. Fortunately. I'm sure that time will come. I'll ask them whether they have symptoms, whether they have functional losses or difficulty maintaining their social function, etcetera. If they have none of these, I will probably do a cognitive test and if they pass with flying colors I would say let's just wait and see. Having amyloid positive does not mean that you are going to get Alzheimer’s disease.
Lewis: So who should get this test? Like, if you have a family history of Alzheimer’s, should you check it out?
Fischman: Maybe if you have close family members who had the disease, plus a few other risk factors. Like if you’re starting to experience some mild cognitive impairment, or you’ve had a concussion or some other traumatic brain injury.
If you’re younger than age 50, you probably shouldn’t waste your time or money with the test, Quest says. That is a low risk category.
Lewis: But what happens if you do get that positive result, and then get a medical workup that confirms Alzheimer’s? Then what can you do?
Fischman: It’s tough. Even the newest drugs like Leqembi may offer limited help, just slowing cognitive decline by five months or so.
Lewis: Plus a few people in the drug trials had deadly brain bleeds. People taking blood-thinning drugs may be at extra risk for those.
Fischman: I know. That’s what’s tricky about this whole thing. It’s very personal and difficult. Maybe five more months of remembering how to cook a favorite recipe is worth it. It could be really important to you.
Or, since you might forget that recipe a few weeks later, you don’t want to risk damaging your brain even more.
Lewis: These are really tough choices. But perhaps in the future, if the drugs get better, then an early warning of disease from these blood tests may make more sense. Treatment could start sooner, and it might lead to happier results.
[CLIP: Show music]
Fischman: Your Health, Quickly is produced by Tulika Bose, Jeff DelViscio, Kelso Harper, Carin Leong, and by us. It’s edited by Elah Feder and Alexa Lim. Our music is composed by Dominic Smith.
Lewis: Our show is a part of Scientific American’s podcast, Science, Quickly. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show, give us a rating or review!
And if you have ideas for topics we should cover, send us an email at Yourhealthquickly@sciam.com. That’s your health quickly at S-C-I-A-M dot com.
Jeff DelViscio: Hi Science, Quickly listeners. This is Jeff DelViscio, executive producer of the show.
The whole podcast team is out in the field, so while we’re away, we’re bringing back a few amazing oldies from the archive.
Today we have a show on a piece of research so electrifying we just had to reanimate it.
Producer Shayla Love brings us a story about research that might change the way you look at bees—forever.
Bees, as we know, buzz. But they also are buzzing with electricity. Get a lot of them together in the air, and the mass effect of their electric flight could rival the charge in a thunderstorm cloud.
Also, if you covered a car battery with 50 million million bees, you could jump-start it.
Real facts.
The episode was first aired on November 15, 2022—when we were still called 60-Second Science. Ah, memories.
Enjoy!
Shayla Love: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Shayla Love.
When you hear a bee buzzing along, visiting a flower, you’re hearing the movement of air made by the fluttering of its wings. But it turns out that bees are buzzing in more than one way.
Giles Harrison: I first saw this when I saw a bumblebee land on an electrode I was using, and I saw a real change in the measurement. And I thought, “This is a charged thing.”
Love: That’s Giles Harrison, a professor of atmospheric physics at the University of Reading in England. He’s co-author of a recent paper in iScience that measured the electric charge of swarms of bees and found that the insects can generate as much electricity as storm clouds.
Ellard Hunting: We’ve known for quite a long time already that bees carried an electric charge.
Love: Ellard Hunting is a biologist at the University of Bristol in England, and he studies how different organisms use those electric fields in the environment. Plants and pollen tend to be negatively charged, and bees are positively charged.
Hunting: The bee visits a flower, and the pollen is actually electrostatically attracted to the bee, and so they stick better and they transfer better.
Love: There are several honeybee hives that are used for research at the field station at the University of Bristol’s school of veterinary sciences. Those bees sometimes swarm, and that’s when the researchers were able to directly measure them using an electric field monitor.
Bees can also electrically sense whether a flower has been visited by another bee who already took its nectar. But until now, it hadn’t been considered that living things flying around in the atmosphere could make an impact with their own charges.
Now, an individual bee’s charge is minuscule: it takes a lot of bees to generate enough electricity to make an impact.
Hunting: Imagine that you need a billion of those to light up an LED.
Harrison: Fifty million million bees to get enough charge to start a car.
Love: But altogether, because there are so many insects in the atmosphere, theycan have a massive effect.
This means that bees and other large groups of insects are capable of changing the atmospheric electric fields around them—potentially impacting things such as weather events, cloud formation and dust dispersal.
Insects are not the only living thing that spends time in the atmosphere. Birds and microorganisms carry charge, too, and take up space in the lower atmosphere.
Even before the bees were measured, we knew the sky was filled with electricity. These static electric fields are found everywhere in Earth’s atmosphere. And they can be swayed by rain, lighting, aerosols, pollution, volcanoes and possibly earthquakes.
Atmospheric electricity is measured as something called the vertical potential gradient, or PG, which is the difference in voltage between the surface of Earth and any point in the air. The team found the swarms of bees could change the PG by 100 to 1,000 volts per meter.
They also modeled how atmospheric electricity might be impacted by other insects, such as desert locusts, which can form swarms of up to 460 square miles. These swarms are dense enough to cram 40 million to 80 million of the insects into less than half a square mile. Based on past measurements of locusts’ electric charges, such swarms create more charge than those reported for electrical storms.
Not all insects pack such an electrical punch. In the modeling, moths and butterflies don’t seem to have a big impact because of their low densities.
Right now insects’ electric charges aren't accounted for in climate models that look at complex interactions in the atmosphere. They probably should be: the combined electric charge of all these insects might impact the development of rain, snow, and droplet formation and maybe even how clouds are made.
Hunting: We can only speculate, but, like, that might have an impact on cloud formation. If there’s a direct link between insects and cloud formation, then we know that clouds are relevant to climate.
Love: Insect electricity could also be influencing how dust moves around the atmosphere. This is something that atmospheric scientists are interested in because such dust cuts off incoming sunlight and can change temperature distributions locally.
Harrison: The link between dust and insects is very interesting because one of the questions in climate change is “How is it that large particles move from the Sahara?” And we just thought about it in terms of the physics of transporting them from the Sahara. What if they’re stuck to a locust because they’re charged? That really changes things, and we could think about it very differently.
Love: After learning about how much of a spark these insects can generate together, it may be time to start taking into account all that extra buzzing up in the air.
Karen Hopkin: This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkin.
They say that practice makes perfect.
[CLIP: Piano sounds]
Hopkin: But sometimes the best practice is not on a keyboard ...
[CLIP: Piano sounds]
Hopkin: It’s all in your head. Because a new study shows that the brain takes advantage of the rest periods during practice to review new skills, a mechanism that facilitates learning. The work appears in the journal Cell Reports. [Ethan R. Buch et al., Consolidation of human skill linked to waking hippocampo-neocortical replay]
Leonardo Cohen: A lot of the skills we learn in life are sequences of individual actions.
Cohen: For example, playing a piece of piano music requires pressing individual keys in the correct sequence with very precise timing.
[CLIP: Piano music]
Hopkin: That level of virtuosity requires a ton of practice and a lot of repetition. But Cohen says it also requires a certain amount of rest.
Cohen: We know from previous research that interspersing rest with practice during training is advantageous for learning a new skill. In fact, we recently showed that virtually all early skill learning is evidenced during rest rather than during the actual practice.
Hopkin: It’s during those intermittent breaks that the brain starts to sew together the individual movements that make up a seamless piece.
[CLIP: Piano music]
Hopkin: The question then becomes: How? To find out, Cohen and his colleagues turned to an imaging technique called magnetoencephalography, or MEG.
Ethan Buch: The unique advantage of MEG is that it allows us to observe neural activity across the entire brain with millisecond time resolution, which is crucial for investigating very fast widespread brain dynamics.
Hopkin: Ethan Buch, Cohen’s colleague at NINDS. They and their team had 30 volunteers sit inside an MEG scanner. And they asked them to type the sequence 41324 on a keyboard as quickly and accurately as possible.
[CLIP: Sounds of typing]
Hopkin: The participants would type for 10 seconds, then rest for 10 seconds, then repeat while the researchers monitored their neural activity.
Buch: And what we found was really quite interesting. So we actually found that the brain kept replaying much faster versions of the practice activity patterns over and over again during rest.
Hopkin: So a sequence that might take one second for fingers to type ...
[CLIP: Sounds of typing]
Hopkin: ... would take just 50 milliseconds for the brain to replay.
[CLIP: Sounds of typing]
Buch: That’s an impressive 20-fold compression.
Hopkin: The regions most active were those involved in controlling movement and representing sequences. And the more often the brain repeated the sequence, the faster the subject improved.
Buch: When the participants were beginning to learn the skill, they were initially typing about five to six repetitions of the sequence during each 10 seconds of practice. But during rest, the brain replayed about 25 repetitions of the sequence, and that’s a fivefold increase over the same amount of time.
Hopkin: That lightning-quick neural rehearsal supercharges learning and memory.
Buch: It’s as if the brain actively exploits these rest periods to amplify the effects of practice and rapidly consolidate the skill memory. And this actually appears to be this skill-binding mechanism that we were looking for.
Hopkin: So next time you sit down to practice ...
[CLIP: Piano music]
Hopkin: Give yourself a break—or a lot of little breaks. Your brain, and your audience, will thank you.
[CLIP: Piano music]
Hopkin: For Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I’m Karen Hopkin.
Natalia Reagan:Animal Tracks Inc is located about 40 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. This animal sanctuary takes in former exotic pets and entertainment industry animals and gives them a new lease on life. The menagerie includes several capuchin monkeys, kangaroos, wolf hybrids, a baboon named Chrissy and my BFF, a six-banded armadillo called Frank the Tank.
[CLIP: Intro music]
Reagan: And you might find something else at Animal Tracks.
[CLIP: Monkey sounds]
Reagan: That is the sound of a lesbian monkey love triangle: three monkeys, two species and one helluva love story.
I’m Natalia Reagan, a primatologist and science comedian, and you’re listening to Science, Quickly.
[CLIP: Show theme music]
Kline: Bailey is a top. Haley is a power bottom. Maci is a flip— she’s a flipper; she can do both! [laughs]
Reagan: That’s Michele Kline, an animal caretaker and volunteer at Animal Tracks. She’s talking about the stars of this primate love triangle: three female capuchin monkeys named Bailey, Haley and Maci.
Now, as scientists, when we describe animals, we don’t typically use terms such as “gay” or “lesbian” and certainly not “power bottom.” We might say something more clinical, such as “same-sex behavior,” which, by the way, is something that’s now been documented in more than 1,500 different species.
Though scientists may record copious amounts of same-sex behavior by individuals in the wild, we still recognize we are not seeing the full spectrum of their behavior. That’s why bisexual or pansexual is a more suitable term for such primates. Like most things in life, sexuality exists on a spectrum—even in monkeys.
And there’s also a reason we’re talking about monkeys in particular. A recent study in Nature Ecology & Evolution found that same-sex behavior in male monkeys has benefits—a conclusion that counteracts what’s often called a “Darwinian paradox.”
The paradox is that homosexual activity occurs even though it does not lead to or aid in reproduction. But according to the new research, being a little gay might help monkeys pass their genes on to future generations.
The study took place on Cayo Santiago, a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico that is home to a colony of more than 1,700 rhesus macaque monkeys. These macaques are not endemic to the area and were brought there in the 1930s by scientists for research purposes.
The new study looked at 236 of these macaque males and found that more than 70 percent of them engaged in same-sex mountings, while only 40 percent of those males copulated with females. And the males that partook in more dude-on-dude nookie had slightly more offspring than others.
Why was this the case? Researchers argue that same-sex relations between males bolster bonds and help form coalitions within their group. These coalitions help males get a literal leg up in the lady love making category. So there is actually an evolutionary advantage to suck or touch macaque! (Sorry.)
But today I want to talk to you about the “unhung hero” of gay animals: lesbian animals and lesbian monkeys, in particular. How do they find each other? What do they do? Do they drive matching Subarus? More importantly, is there an actual evolutionary advantage to monkey lesbian relationships?
Reagan (tape): Did you ever think to yourself, “I’m gonna grow up and be part of [a] lesbian monkey love triangle”?
Kline: Yes [laughs]. No. No, I can’t say that. But here I am, am, and this is what I’m doing, so....
[CLIP: Monkey sounds]
Reagan: I sat down with Stacy Gunderson, executive director of Animal Tracks, and Alyson Wright, its assistant director, to talk about the aforementioned highly salacious trio of Bailey, Haley and Maci.
Haley and Maci are brown capuchin monkeys in their late teens, which makes them mature ladies in monkey years. Bailey is a smaller Panamanian white-faced capuchin and, at four years old, is in the throes of puberty.
Gunderson: Bailey has just come into her own. She’s just matured in the last six to eight months, and she’s become a sexual maniac.
Reagan: Stacy isn’t kidding. Bailey has definitely entered her hormonally charged, Janelle Monáe–inspired “age of pleasure.” And she’s a classic switch-hitting, equal-opportunity lover.
There’s a reason for this. All primates are highly social. Whether it’s grooming, play or sexy-time mounting, this social activity, or affiliative behavior, helps primates develop social bonds that might help them later in life.
Sexual activity is just one way to form these bonds. And because monkeys and apes don’t live in a world shackled by repression and self-inflicted gender or sexuality binaries, it’s a bit of a freaky free-for-all.
Sometimes Bailey also makes moves on Marley, a brown capuchin male (who also happens to be fixed) and encourages him to have his way with her. In fact, Bailey and Marley will even copulate face-to-face, which is a rarity in monkeys.
Face-to-face sex may seem vanilla, but usually this position is only seen in humans and other great apes. But these two seem to enjoy that prolonged, intense eye contact, and so do Haley and Maci.
Oh, to be clear, this is a lesbian monkey love triangle, not a ménage à trois. Bailey pleasures these ladies one-on-one rather than together. And her incentives for pleasing each female monkey are influenced, in part, by their social ranking. Like in humans, sexual activity in monkeys can be somewhat, um, transactional.
The motivation is a bit like “I’ll butter your biscuits in hopes that’ll you’ll butter mine—or at least have my back in an argument or share food with me or drive the getaway car when we rob the banana stand.”
When Bailey feels particularly dominant, she focuses her attention on Haley. Haley is the lowest in the monkey pecking order at Animal Tracks, so for Bailey, mounting her appears to be a bit about asserting dominance, all while pleasuring her.
[CLIP: Monkey sounds]
Reagan: Now Maci is higher-ranking, so Bailey’s motivations with her seem to be to calm her down and improve social bonds, which may serve as a long-term political move. So by giving Maci the best 30 seconds of her life, Bailey is improving her social status among the monkeys at Animal Tracks. In fact, Bailey has learned how to properly take care of Maci by watching her do it to herself.
Kline: Bailey has seen her do this so many times, so when Bailey sees Maci do it, she realizes it not only calms Maci down, but she takes pleasure in it. So what Bailey will do is insert herself, literally, and give Maci a hand, literally.
Reagan: Folks, the best way I can describe this move is, well, a reach-around.
Kline: I have video of reach-around, reach under, reach over.
Reagan: For years researchers have attempted to explain away the gay by saying that homosexual behavior is solely about asserting dominance or quelling tension. But for this lesbian monkey love triangle, this behavior also has a lot to do with giving—and receiving— pleasure. And it’s also about forming and maintaining important bonds with other females.
Gunderson: These monkeys, they come from [a] solitary existence, so masturbation is self-soothing. So Haley has that as one of her self-soothing techniques.
Bailey is very physical, and so I think part of the calming process is releasing sexual tension.
Reagan: I can relate.
Oh, and to make things interesting, capuchin monkeys have what is called a hypertrophied, or enlarged, clitoris.
Gunderson: It just looks like a miniature penis.
Reagan: Let’s just put it this way: capuchins have a very high “cliteracy” rate.
[CLIP: Monkey sounds]
Reagan: But does Maci enjoy this hands-on attention?
Kline: Maci loves it. Maci encourages it. And so another thing that Maci does—she will rub her chest, and that’s a signal to other monkeys that she’s feeling fancy.
So when she does this, Bailey takes this as a sign that “oh, okay, I’m kinda needed over here, and let me help you out, girl.”
Reagan: So this behavior definitely sounds like flirting. And I had to know more!
Reagan (tape): What does monkey flirting look like?
Wright: They actually will use their hands to kinda rub their check area in a flirtatious manner and kinda lip smack each other, a little bit.
Reagan (tape): What does lip smacking sound like?
[CLIP: Lip smacking sounds]
Gunderson: There is some head cocking and some eye batting.
Wright: Yes, very much so. They do googly eyes at each other.
I will mention, Haley, we affectionately call her “Coochie Girl” because she constantly is touching herself.
Reagan: But do the monkeys flirt with humans? Now, because Bailey came to Animal Tracks as a baby, the sanctuary’s director Stacy is like a mom to her, so Bailey does not flirt with her. In fact, Stacy has never witnessed her lascivious behavior—Bailey hides it from her.
Given how close Michele is with Bailey, however, I had to ask ...
Reagan (tape): Do the monkeys ever flirt with you?
Kline: Yes. Yes, absolutely. It’s all just who’s feeling themselves at that time of the month. And then some of the relationships with the monkeys is different. So a lot of them will flirt even when it’s not that time of the month. It’s kinda like Russian roulette, monkey-style. Who’s feeling spicy, you know?
Gunderson: Bailey wants to go in with—we call him “Uncle Marley”—any chance she gets. And Marley lives with Haley, so she gets the benefit of Marley, who mounts her, and then she can mount Haley anytime she wants.
Reagan (tape): So this is more of a capuchin foursome, at least for Bailey.
Wright: Yeah. She lives with Maci, and I think she gets bored with her, because we all see what goes on all day long, or all night long. So she gets a variety.
Reagan(tape): It is the spice of life.
Reagan (tape): But does Bailey prefer Marley, Maci or Haley?
Gunderson: I think, like any woman, it depends on her mood.
Could you imagine Bailey being as sexual as she is if she was a lone monkey living with humans? She would be so unsatisfied. It would be a very sad existence for her. Here she has a multitude of monkeys she can molest on any given day.
Kline: I genuinely believe that at the core of this is everyone learning to self-regulate. And pleasuring yourself is a way to do that. It’s a way to self-regulate and self-sooth.
Reagan: Like most things in life, lesbian monkey love triangles are complicated. They are fueled by the pursuit of pleasure and the desire to build critical social bonds that can be beneficial to a monkey’s survival. And in the case of those macaque males, homosexual behavior can help increase their number of offspring.
So even though homosexual activity has often been ignored, explained away or seen as a deviation from the norm, it’s clear being a little gay nearly every day helps primates get their way—in pleasure and in life. This goes for the reproductive success of macaque males and the lesbian monkey ladies of Animal Tracks.
By the way, monkeys aren’t the only primates known for their lesbian lovemaking. Great apes are all about it, too! Stay tuned for future episodes on bisexual bonobo babes.
And if you’d like to support this salacious simian trio, you can donate to Animal Tracks at animaltracksinc.org. If you’re in Los Angeles area, you can book a tour to see Bailey, Maci and Haley in action—and possibly getting some action, too!
Until then, you’re listening to Science, Quickly. This has been Natalia Reagan.
Scientific American’s Science, Quickly is produced and edited by Tulika Bose, Jeff DelViscio and Kelso Harper. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.
You can listen to Science, Quickly wherever you get your podcasts. For more up-to-date and in-depth science news, head to ScientificAmerican.com. Thanks, and see you next time.
Sophie Bushwick: Exciting new technology is on the rise, doing the same work that humans can but faster and more cheaply. That's great news for the people rich enough to buy these machines, but it's disrupting the lives and livelihoods of less powerful workers. And some of those workers are ready to fight back.
I'm talking, of course, about the Luddites, the 19th-century textile workers known for smashing automated machinery. And if you see some similarities between their situation and today's, when the rise of Big Tech and artificial intelligence is disrupting the labor market and also inspiring a bit of a backlash, well, you're not the only one.
And this is Tech, Quickly, the loom-smashing but tech-loving edition of Scientific American’s Science, Quickly podcast. I’m Sophie Bushwick, tech editor at Scientific American.
And I've heard their movement mentioned a lot recently, particularly in relation to generative AI. For instance, news recently broke that copyrighted books, including those by Steven King, were used to train an AI language model. And King wrote an essay for the Atlantic in which he says he wouldn’t forbid this type of thing, and that anyone who would might as well be: “a Luddite trying to stop industrial progress by hammering a steam loom to pieces.” This idea that Luddites just hated new technology is pretty pervasive. But is it accurate?
Brian Merchant: It is not accurate. It's one that's been lodged in the cultural consciousness for almost 200 years now though, so it's hard to blame him. I love Stephen King. I love his writing. I love his writing on writing. But he's fallen victim to this fallacy about the Luddites, which is that they were technophobic, they wanted to stop progress itself, which couldn't be further from the truth.
What the Luddites wanted to do was to stop the machinery that was very specifically exploiting them or being used as leverage against them to reduce their quality of life, to cut their wages, to force them into factories.
So, the Luddites protest against machinery, again against very specific kinds of machinery. They were technologists; they loved technology themselves in many many cases. But they had an issue a specific machinery being used in specific ways, namely by elites who wanted to force them into factories and degrade their standard of living.
Bushwick: Would you say that their, um, attempt to rebel against this succeeded or failed?
Merchant: That's a really complicated question—it was illegal to form a union in those days. So they were forced to use very creative tactics to sort of register their complaint, and when they did take up arms in this very specific way for the first six months or so they were very successful in the short term in getting some of those, ah, those wages raised, getting their conditions improved, getting back some of the bargaining power. In the medium term, they were less successful because their movement was violently crushed by the British state and by the Crown and by the industrialists who the crown was assisting. Dozens of Luddites were hung. Others were killed in those protests.
And then the victors of that battle got the opportunity to impress upon history this idea that Luddism is backwards-looking, establishing what's basically a propaganda campaign on behalf of those industrialists to equate progress with any kind of technology at all, even technology that could exploit hundreds of thousands of people as it did.
Bushwick: And we're in a moment now when technology is again threatening people's jobs. Specifically there have been a lot of stories about generative AI being used to replace copywriters, the idea that it could threaten the jobs of software coders, that instead of hiring an illustrator, places are just going to use this AI-generated art. So can we draw any parallels? What parallels can we draw between the situation the Luddites were in and then the modern automation threatening jobs today?
Merchant: The way that I would put it is that the parallels are uncanny.
So much is aligned with what what was going on at the Luddites' time that we can really sort of go one to one in a lot of cases. So, here's this revolutionary-seeming new technology, generative AI, that its creators are claiming have vast power, can replace vast numbers of jobs. That was very similar to what was happening 200 years ago.
You had the entrepreneurs adopting things like the power loom or the wide frame or the implements that would automate various parts of the cloth industry, saying, this is this new machinery is going to be a great boon to England; it's going to be an engine of progress.
In reality, again, this is a parallel, neither of the technologies were quite there yet, right? And so, in a lot of cases, the technology could be used more powerfully by the entrepreneurs or by the industrialists as leverage or bargaining power or a means of sort of saying hey we need to reduce wages because we're just going to use the machinery to do it anyways.
Bushwick: And you mentioned how when the Luddites were doing their protests, they didn't have unions, they didn't have the right to do this sort of collective action. As opposed to today, when we have, for the first time in decades in Hollywood, writers and actors–they're all going on strike. Not solely because of AI, but that's definitely one of the issues that they're trying to deal with as part of these, ah, strikes. So do you think that they are more likely to succeed than the Luddites were?
Merchant: Absolutely. I mean I think the crucial difference is that, you know, this is an industry that is very well organized, that has a good deal of power. And they, they, they can force their employers to the bargaining table to hash out these issues. We should be thankful that they have sort of sounded this clarion call because in a lot of ways, you know, the same issues are going to be coming for other industries.
So the writers and the artists stand to be more successful for that reason alone—that they are organized, and it's popular. Again, I think I don't know if I mentioned this, the Luddites were super popular in the day. They were like Robin Hood. They were cheered in the streets because just about everybody understood the way that the wind was blowing.
Bushwick: And it's not just in the case of the writers strike that I've heard the term Luddite used. Another example is that in San Francisco right now, there's a big rollout of these self-driving robo taxis. And there have been a lot of issues coming up around this, but one of them is a group has been protesting them by putting traffic cones on the hoods of these cars because it tells the censors that there's an obstacle, there's something wrong, and so the car stops with no damage to it, but it is a form of protest. And some of the protesters have been compared to Luddites. Now the issue for them is not their own employment. But they are protesting this technology. Do you think it's still fair to say that this is a sort of Luddite movement?
Merchant: Yeah, I think this is a Luddite tactic through and through and not in the derogatory sense, in the sense that these are people who are standing up for their community when democratic channels have been sort of ignored. I mean, if you look at the polling data and you look at the general sentiment, people don't want driverless cars running rampant in their communities.
We've seen very viscerally how dangerous it can be, how deadly self-driving car technology can be in some cases and what a nuisance it can be to things like emergency service providers and firefighters, policemen. They've all come out against this and said this: not yet. And it's unclear to most people why it needs to be rammed through, why the experimentation period can't be longer or can't be more careful. So if we can't get sort of the bare level of assurances and transparency from government, when new technologies are rolled out, I think it's completely justified for people to basically do Luddism.
Bushwick: And you've mentioned that the Luddites in the short-term were successful, but in the long-term you know they were the subject of a propaganda campaign. We've got Stephen King being like, ah, being a Luddite is is futile. It's, it's, it's resisting technology for no purpose. And that's the idea that many people still have hundreds of years later. So, if you're if you were going to give advice to modern Luddites, what do you think they need to do to avoid the same fate?
Merchant: You know I think we're getting to the point to where people have sort of at least, ah, loosened their, ah, knee-jerk sort of reaction in that direction. We're kind of at this point again where the negative effects of technology in a lot of spheres, whether you're talking about in the working world or social media, overstimulation, we're seeing a lot of the detrimental effects of technology, and we're seeing sort of a resurgence of this desire to sort of be able to offer more input and more, ah, have more say and how it's, ah, how it's rolled out.
We've sort of handed the keys to a handful of Silicon Valley giants and said, “Okay, you, you see what you can come up with, and then we'll kind of deal with it, we'll take the rearguard action,” but it does not have to be that way. And that's what I want to sort of beat home: the Luddites represented an alternate path.
If we look at what they really stood for it really comes down to a more just, more equitable, and more democratic development of technology, one that more people would have benefited from. How do we do that today?
Bushwick:Science, Quickly is produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose, Kelso Harper and Carin Leong. Our show is edited by Elah Feder and Alexa Lim. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.
Don’t forget to subscribe to Science, Quickly wherever you get your podcasts. For more in-depth science news and features, go to ScientificAmerican.com. And if you like the show, give us a rating or review!
For Scientific American’s Science, Quickly, I’m Sophie Bushwick.
Tanya Lewis: I’m standing on the rooftop of NYU Langone Health, a hospital in midtown Manhattan, scanning the sky over the East River for a helicopter. It’s New York City, so there are tons of helicopters, but I’m looking for a specific one.
[CLIP: Helicopter sounds]
Finally I spot it: a white helicopter with red-and-white blades, carrying some very precious cargo. The blades whir to a halt, and some people step out. One man is carrying a big white box. Inside the box? A pig kidney.
[CLIP: Show music]
This is Science, Quickly. I’m Tanya Lewis.
I run back into the hospital to watch the small team arrive through the elevator doors wheeling the box with the kidney on ice. I follow them right up to the operating floor.
[CLIP: Organ being transported]
And that’s as far as I can go. Only surgeons and nurses and a handful of observers are allowed in the operating room. There’s a risk of the pig organ carrying a virus that could infect people. And they are scrubbed in with personal protective equipment on. The surgical staff also had to undergo special blood testing before and after the surgery to ensure they stay infection free.
So I make my way back to a small room with a live video feed of the operation.
[CLIP: Xenotransplant control room]
Lewis: I’m here to watch an organ transplant. But not just any transplant: a pig kidney is being transplanted into a human. This is known as a xenotransplant.
The human recipient is not alive—he suffered brain death as a result of a complication from a cancerous brain tumor. The body of the decedent, as researchers refer to him, is being maintained on life support. He wasn’t able to donate his organs, but his family has generously agreed to donate his body for the experiment.
I watch the live video feed of the surgery. The surgeon starts prepping the organ to be transplanted.
Once it’s ready, he lowers it into the decedent’s abdominal cavity. He has removed the decedent’s own kidneys already, so the only kidney function will come from the pig organ.
The surgeon carefully sutures the pig kidney’s blood vessels to the deceased person’s renal artery and vein.
He also connects the ureter—the tube that connects the kidney to the bladder—from the pig organ to the human ureter. The kidney flushes pink as blood begins to flow through it and starts producing urine.
Montgomery (tape): The total ischemic time was..., which is good. And it worked right away and started to make urine almost immediately....
Lewis: That’s the transplant surgeon, Robert Montgomery.
Robert Montgomery: So my name is Robert Montgomery, and I'm the chair of the department of surgery at NYU Langone health, and the director of the transplant Institute.
Lewis: The surgery is done now. Here he is leading a debriefing with the transplant team at the decedent’s bedside.
Montgomery (tape): So we did the xenotransplant and we did a bilateral native nephrectomy. So all the urine that's coming out is coming from the xenograft, and that will continue to be the case.... So we're off to a good start....
Lewis: Montgomery knows a thing or two about transplants. Not only has he done thousands of kidney transplants, he himself had a heart transplant several years ago.
Montgomery: I had a heart transplant, it's almost five years, next month, it's five years. It's just extraordinary. And I was in really bad shape. I had seven cardiac arrests where I had to be resuscitated. Then one where I was down for a very long period of time getting CPR and I was just so lucky to recover from that. And one time, where I was in a coma for a month after I had an event. So I beat all the odds for sure.
Lewis: Montgomery suffered from a type of congenital heart disease. It claimed the life of his father. It also took one of his brothers, who was just 35 years old when he died. His other brother got a heart transplant 26 years ago.
Montgomery: So, you know, this has been with me, my whole life. I've been a patient as long as I've been a doctor, and I've had a lot of time to think about this. And certainly, it's influenced my life as a transplant surgeon tremendously. And I'm always looking for the next big thing that could make a big difference in the lives of people who need transplants.
Lewis: Montgomery wants to create a virtually unlimited source of organs for people who need them. That’s why he got interested in doing xenotransplants.
Montgomery: So, organ supply is our biggest unmet need. There are over 100,000 people waiting for organs, and only about a third of them will actually make it across the finish line. And everyone else will either become too sick to benefit from a transplant or will die waiting.
And it doesn't even take into account all the people who die before they get listed for transplant because the allocation of organs is based on severity of illness, and you have to get really sick before you're even considered to get put on the transplant list.
Lewis: Currently, all transplanted organs come from either living or deceased human donors. But very few people die in a way that their organs could be used for transplants.
Pig xenotransplants offer a way to potentially give more people a chance to get an organ that would save their life.
Montgomery: So the current paradigm of somebody having to die for someone else to live is not working. And we need an alternative, sustainable renewable source of organs and xenotransplantation is the most promising right now.
Lewis: The pig organs used in these transplants have been genetically modified so they don’t produce a sugar called alpha gal, which is found in pigs and causes the human immune system to attack, or reject, the organ.
Rejection is already a problem for human-to-human transplants, but pig organs pose a special challenge.
Montgomery: Two humans are much more alike than a human and a pig, right? So you can imagine, just the variation in what we call antigens, different carbohydrates and proteins that–the genetic code is just really different between a pig and human. There's a lot of potential targets for the human immune system—less so when you have two humans.
Lewis: I asked Montgomery what it was like to actually do this xenotransplant, knowing how much was at stake for the field if it didn’t go as planned.
He’s a pretty calm person—just as you’d expect a transplant surgeon to be.
Montgomery: When you're doing something that hasn't been done before, you do feel this tremendous weight. And, you know, it's very clear that we're not going to have many shots on goal here that don't end in success. I'm very aware of that. But I've been at this for 35 years, and once I get in the operating room…and it is an experience, where everything just kind of collapses down onto the task at hand. And any thoughts or doubts or anything that you have in your mind quickly go away, and you're just focused on getting the job done.
Lewis: This was actually the fifth xenotransplant he and his colleagues at NYU have done using a decedent model.
Montgomery: Up until 2021, all of the xenotransplants from genetically edited pigs had been put in primates. So there had never been a pig-to-human transplant that had been done.
And we did the first one in September of 2021. And we put that organ into an individual who had been declared dead by neurologic criteria, so they were brain dead. But the heart was still beating, and that individual was being maintained on a ventilator. And the idea there was that we had an opportunity to test one of these organs in someone who couldn't be harmed if things didn't work out well.
Lewis: NYU soon did another kidney xenotransplant, and a team at the University of Alabama did one as well. Then NYU did two heart xenotransplants. But these previous experiments only lasted a few days before the decedent was taken off of life support. The University of Alabama just did another kidney transplant experiment that lasted a week.
But this one has been going for more than a month, and they just got approval to extend the experiment for up to another month.
Back in early 2022, a team at the University of Maryland transplanted a pig heart into a living person—a man named David Bennett. Bennett lived for two months with the new organ, but ultimately it failed and he passed away.
The exact reason for the failure is still unclear, but a previously undetected pig virus may have played a role.
Montgomery: So there's still, you know, a lot of mystery in terms of what happened. But what we do know is the heart suddenly stopped working. One of the things that was present at that time was an infection, a virus called cytomegalovirus, CMV, that came from the pig and stayed in the pig tissue and never infected any of the human tissue or cells.
But we know from decades of primate work, when the organ ... when the pig heart is infected with that virus, that it causes the heart to start to go rapidly downhill. So, we think that played a role, but there also appeared to be some rejection as well.
Lewis: Montgomery and his team take these risks seriously. They have developed a more accurate test to screen for pig viruses, and they monitor the recipient and anyone who comes into contact with them very closely.
Decedent experiments like the one they are currently doing will be crucial to showing the FDA that these pig organs are safe and effective enough for clinical trials in living people.
NYU hopes to be one of the first sites to participate in such a trial.
For Montgomery, it’s a personal mission as much as a professional one.
Montgomery: As I laid for a month in the ICU waiting for a human organ, it came even more clearly into focus that this is what I needed to devote the rest of my life to. I kind of feel like I'm living on borrowed time anyway. And this, has become the thing that I really feel is a chance at really changing the future in a really significant way for all the people who ... I share their level of, of desperation, you know, and understand it, when you're waiting for a transplant, it's a really extremely vulnerable and difficult position to be in.
Lewis: Science, Quickly is produced by Tulika Bose, Jeff DelViscio, Kelso Harper, Carin Leong and me. It’s edited by Elah Feder and Alexa Lim. Our music is composed by Dominic Smith.
Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show, give us a rating or review!
For Science, Quickly, I’m Tanya Lewis.
[Image credit: Joe Carrotta for NYU Langone Health]
Editor’s Note (8/28/23): This story is being republished because Tropical Storm Idalia is forecast to rapidly intensify into a major hurricane before making landfall in Florida sometime on Wednesday.
Andrea Thompson: This is Science, Quickly. I'm Andrea Thompson, Scientific American's news editor for earth and environment.
Summer means sun, heat, sand and the start of hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean from June 1 to November 30. Tropical storms and hurricanes can spin up over the warm waters, bringing punishing winds, torrential rains and pounding surf when they hit land.
Our ability to forecast these massive storms has improved considerably in the last few decades, but they can still throw us plenty of curveballs. To help us understand the secrets of these meteorological mysteries, we're talking to Kim Wood, an assistant professor of meteorology at Mississippi State University.
Thompson: Hey, Kim, thanks for joining us.
Wood: Thank you, I'm happy to be here.
Thompson: So to start with, what happens to turn a mishmash of thunderstorms into this monster cyclone? You know, really take us into the heart of the beast.
Wood: So when a storm has the potential to become a tropical cyclone, the generic term for a tropical storm or a hurricane, it needs certain ingredients to be in place. So we need those thunderstorms to be there as sort of the seed disturbance.
But for that to then become this organized storm, the ocean needs to be warm enough to provide energy to keep those thunderstorms going, there needs to be air rising, there needs to be moisture because they're clouds. They need that water vapor to exist.
And there's something called vertical wind shear, which is a change in wind speed or direction with height. And if there isn't much of that, the thunderstorms can build more straight upward. And that makes them more efficient in turning that ocean energy into becoming a tropical cyclone.
So once it starts to get organized, you get that rotation there, then that ongoing circulation, once it's in place, that helps continue focusing the energy so it can intensify further.
Thompson: Great. Now, can you describe a little bit the components of a hurricane? You know, people might hear about the eye or the eyewall? You know, what are those? And how do they kind of lead into perpetuating the strength of the storm?
Wood: Yeah. So when you look at a mature hurricane, and we use the word mature because it has these components in place. So when it's getting organized in the tropical storm phase, it'll have a center, which the winds are moving around in a circle, but it can look kind of lopsided, like the thunderstorms are more to one side than the other.
But as a storm continues to organize, that asymmetry decreases, meaning those thunderstorms are starting to wrap more around the center, so it's less lopsided. And that increasing structure, that organization helps kind of take advantage of the energy that is in place for it to continue intensifying.
So the eye is the center of the storm once it's strong enough to have an eyewall in place, meaning that there is a circle of strong thunderstorms wrapping around that center. So an eye starts to appear when it's around that hurricane strength threshold of 74 miles an hour, because it's increased in organization. So you've got the eye that can be clear—it depends on how strong the storm is—and then the eyewall, or the strong thunderstorms that wrap around that.
And then as you go away from that location, that's where you see what we call rain bands, which are the outer parts of the storm that also can produce hazards like heavy rainfall and have winds associated with them. But it's not as strong as what we see right around the center.
Thompson: Is climate change is going to keep ratcheting up these storms, and what can we expect from hurricanes in a warmer world?
Wood: I wish we had an easy answer to this. Yes, climate change will do this. But we have these competing factors. So warmer conditions means warmer water, which is more energy.
But these warmer conditions also affect things like where's the wind shear and how strong is it? Where is the humidity? And how is that changing in space and time?
For example, we saw some interesting behavior in the Atlantic last August in 2022, where nothing happened. We thought we'd see stuff, and we didn't. And one of the factors is likely that there was dry air out in the Atlantic that was preventing those seed disturbances I referenced earlier from becoming tropical cyclones. And so we've got these competing factors for what could happen under climate change.
Now, one of the things we are watching for is the potential for storms to achieve higher intensities because there would be more energy. So one of the findings that seems to be consistent across studies so far is that we do expect stronger storms, but just because we expect stronger storms doesn't mean we expect more storms overall.
And one of the things to be thinking about with respect to impacts, is a storm doesn't necessarily have to be strong to have strong impacts. Because they might move slower and thus dump rain for a longer time, resulting in freshwater flooding.
We've got issues with changes in how high sea level is, and thus less how far in water can be pushed from the ocean when a storm does make landfall. And those are not directly tied to how strong the storm is. The strength does affect that, but it's not a 1:1 ratio, a strong storm equals a strong storm surge or a lot of rain.
Thompson: Right. And yeah, to talk a little bit about storm impacts, because we rate hurricanes by their wind speed, that doesn't always give the right impression of you know what impacts to expect from a storm because wind speed isn't the only thing that does damage, right?
Wood: Right, exactly. An unfortunate example of this is Hurricane Florence from 2018, where, as Florence approached the Atlantic coast of the U.S., it was weakening in the sense of its maximum sustained winds were decreasing, but the storm was getting bigger. It was growing in size and extent. And if you have a larger area being impacted by wind over water, that's more water that gets pushed toward shore and thus a worse storm surge.
Thompson: Right.
Wood: The other thing is that it slowed down. So by slowing down, it rained harder over the same location, or it rained more, because it was there for longer. And that resulted in more rain-related impacts, upwards of three feet of rain in places.
Thompson: Wow, that is a lot of rain.
Wood: Yes, it's hard to picture when you're talking about rain in units of feet.
Thompson: With satellites and supercomputers and other tech advances, we can forecast hurricanes pretty precisely now, more so than in the past.
Can you walk us through how we've improved hurricane prediction, particularly when it comes to some of the most dangerous storms, those that jump in strength in just a few hours?
Wood: So I'll start from the observation side with our satellite capabilities. So with the GOES 16 and GOES 18 satellites that are now GOES-East and GOES-West, respectively, we have an instrument called the Advanced Baseline Imager.
It, so to speak, takes pictures very often with really good resolution. And it's much easier to see how the thunderstorms are evolving over time for a storm, as it's getting its act together, so to speak, organizing, starting develop that eyewall, and then once it does have an eye and eyewall, how is that changing over time.
So we're getting more information on shorter timescales about how those thunderstorms are changing, which is important because thunderstorms occur on, you know, pretty quick timescales over the course of minutes or so. And you want to see what's happening in those minutes to be able to get a sense of how those processes could then translate to changes for the storm, more broadly speaking.
Thompson: Right. Now, would tools like AI be able to help us continue improving forecasts and understanding what's happening in these storms?
Wood: Yeah, there's quite a few papers that have come out recently, scientific analyses that take AI tools to tease out signals that are too complicated for a human eye to capture in a short amount of time.
And when I say signals, it's things like what are those thunderstorms doing? And it's not just are they getting stronger or weaker? But where are they? Like, how are they moving around the center of the storm? And are we seeing increases in how circular things are? How symmetric the storm is? Are we seeing decreases?
So AI tools help tease out those signals so that a forecaster doesn't have to watch a loop of satellite imagery over and over to see it themselves.
Thompson: So what really blows your mind about a hurricane?
Wood: Phew, this is a wonderful question. The fact that the physics underlying a hurricane is the same across ocean basins—the Atlantic, the Eastern Pacific, the Western Pacific, the South Indian Ocean—and yet we watch these incredibly diverse ranges of behavior.
We get these incredibly powerful storms, like Mawar that happened recently in the Western North Pacific, like Patricia in 2015 in the Eastern North Pacific, but then you also get these storms like Tropical Storm Arlene from just last week in the Gulf of Mexico, where it's like, yes, that was a tropical cyclone. It was pretty asymmetric.
But, you know, it still counts as a tropical cyclone and it formed from a different approach, different seed disturbance, than something like Typhoon Mawar or Hurricane Patricia, and yet they're still tropical cyclones. And we can learn so much about them by investigating the weak storms and the strong storms and everything in between.
Thompson: Well, thank you for joining us and helping us understand a little bit better how hurricanes work.
Wood: Thank you again for having me. It was a pleasure to chat.
Thompson: Science, Quickly is produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose, Kelso Harper and Carin Leong. Our show was edited by Elah Feder and Alexa Limb. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.
Don't forget to subscribe to Science, Quickly wherever you get your podcasts. And for a daily dose of science, sign up for our new Today in Science newsletter. Our colleague Andrea Gawrylewski delivers some of the most interesting and awe-inspiring science news, opinion, and whatever else strikes your fancy to your inbox each afternoon. We think you'll enjoy it. Check it out at sciam.com/newsletters.
Jacob Job: The night skies have fascinated humans for as long as we have been around. Celestial bodies have become actors in our myths and folklore. And from the stars and heavens, we draw inspiration and even religion.
But the night skies have also taught us how to keep time and coordinate our days and seasons.
We have long used the night skies to live our lives more predictably and make our way through the world more purposefully.
Job: But we’re not the only ones.
I’m Jacob Job, and you’re listening to Scientific American’s Science, Quickly. Today, part four of our five-part series on the Nighttime Bird Surveillance Network—an informal but important global audio dragnet that tracks some of the billions of migratory birds as they fly through the night.
Benjamin Van Doren: If you’re lucky, and it’s a clear night, and the moon is illuminated, there are so many birds migrating on average on these nights that if you use a telescope and look at the moon for a few minutes, you’re likely to see a bird high overhead flying and silhouetted in front of the face of the moon.
Seeing birds fly in front of the moon or hearing the calls from above, I found really thrilling because it felt like I was tapping into this vast mysterious pulse-of-the-planet phenomenon that was just so much bigger than me.
[CLIP:Theme music]
Job: Migratory birds navigate to their summer and winter homes by way of the moon and stars. On any given night during migration, there might be thousands of birds flying in the skies above you and tens or hundreds of millions more moving across the continent.
We still don’t fully understand the true scope of this mass movement. But now science is turning to machines to unlock the secrets of nocturnal migration.
Job: The nighttime bird surveillance network all started with one six-foot sound dish, an expensive studio microphone on reel-to-reel tape and a bunch of hay bales more than 60 years ago. In time, the mics got a lot smaller, and the network grew and grew.
Today people all over the world have created a vast, informal network of night sky listeners.
Interpreting all of these data, however, has created a new challenge.
It’s one that scientists at the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology are tackling head-on.
Van Doren: My name is Benjamin Van Doren. I am a scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Job: Benjamin grew up in New York State and is a postdoctoral research fellow who studies the science of bird migration. His interest in birds goes back a long way, about as far back as his ties to the Lab of Ornithology.
Van Doren: I particularly got into birds when I was about eight years old in third grade, and that was thanks to a classroom program that involved watching birds at bird feeders outside the classroom and recording what we saw and actually submitting our data to the ornithologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which I thought was the coolest thing.
I was really intrigued by the puzzle of bird identification, that I could learn the tricks to identifying a bird and then be able to put that knowledge to use outside in the real world when I saw a flash of color go by or, later on, heard a sound.
Job: During high school, his interest grew deeper.
Van Doren: I also started to get really interested in bird migration, and for a bird-watcher, migration is a really exciting period of the year because each day can bring an entirely new set of birds or species to your local park or even your backyard—birds that are in the middle of these long journeys of thousands of miles.
Job: But what really sealed Benjamin’s fate as a nighttime bird migration fanatic was a talk he attended at the lab on, you probably guessed it, nocturnal migration.
Van Doren: I was captivated by that. And the additional layer of mystery is that songbird migration in large part occurs at night, so it’s also literally shrouded in darkness.
Job: He decided to start monitoring birds on his own.
Van Doren: I ended up starting a research project in high school that included making audio recordings and looking at radar data. This was a whole nother level of experiencing something that was hidden to so many other people, so I really found that exciting, and I’m still pretty much doing that today.
Job: And now he’s busy solving the puzzle of how to quickly and accurately analyze thousands of hours and many terabytes of nocturnal migration data.
But more people are joining the nighttime surveillance network. More and more data are flying in from nighttime listening stations. Benjamin is one of the few researchers trying to get arms around all of it.
And he has a big data problem on his hands.
A single night of recording produces anywhere from eight to 12 hours of audio that is about one to three gigabytes in size. And that’s only at one location. Hundreds of people are recording migration all across the U.S. and beyond. Nightly audio intelligence from the network then needs to be combed through to find moments where migratory birds emitted nocturnal flight calls, or NFCs, above the microphone. During especially busy nights, that can mean more than 20,000 NFCs in a single recording from one site.
Then comes the problem of deciphering those calls.
Van Doren: Flight calls are very short vocalizations. They might last a fifth or even a twentieth of a second, and so it takes a lot of skill and practice to learn how to identify these calls, especially by ear—something I personally don’t feel that confident at. And processing hours and hours of passive audio recordings can be extremely tedious and difficult.
Job: And if you’re in the business of studying migratory birds like Benjamin and other scientists at the Lab of Ornithology are, that can get overwhelming.
Van Doren: We have hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of hours of recordings that we may want to analyze, which is just way too much for the small number of skilled humans who can do this sort of thing by hand.
So ... we really need computers to do some of the work for us to be able to get any useful, large-scale information out of these long passive audio recordings. And so that’s why we turn to machine learning.
Job: Machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, is something we’ve all been hearing a lot about lately. But really, it’s been around for quite some time.
Van Doren: Machine learning describes such a vast array of computational tools that it is really everywhere in our lives, everywhere from credit-card-fraud detection to facial recognition to my phone suggesting which apps to open at a certain time of day.
Job: I mean, even as I wrote this episode, Google Docs suggested, oftentimes correctly, the next word or phrase I planned on typing. That’s possible because of machine learning. But Benjamin uses a specific type for bird call data.
Van Doren: One area of machine learning is computer vision, which we can use to distinguish dogs from cats in pictures, for example—or, in our case, distinguish different birds on audio recordings by feeding the computer not the raw sound itself but actually the visual representation of sound as a spectrogram, really a picture that represents the sound.
Job: Basically the spectrograms Benjamin is referring to are visual fingerprints of nocturnal flight call audio.
Van Doren: We feed the computer these spectrograms that we’ve classified as one species or another, and then, as we repeat that thousands and thousands of times, the computer learns to be able to distinguish one species from another.
Job: So if we want a computer to learn how to identify dogs in pictures, you feed it many thousands of images of different dogs: small ones, large ones, dogs of all colors, dogs in different poses. Eventually, after enough training like this, the computer can recognize if a dog is present in most any picture you present it.
Van Doren: If we train our models well enough, it can give us an accurate, or at least useful, estimate of the numbers of birds that were passing overhead, which species they were. And so very quickly, perhaps 300 [times] faster than real time, we can begin to process thousands of hours of audio in an efficient manner with these kinds of tools.
Job: If you’re a birder, you may already be familiar with this technology. The Lab of Ornithology added a feature to its Merlin Bird ID app called “Sound ID”.
Essentially, if you hear a bird outside and want to know what it is, you can tap this feature in the Merlin app and point your phone’s microphone toward the singing bird. After analyzing the spectrogram of the bird’s song, the app spits out its best guess as to what species of bird is singing in front of you.
It’s highly accurate and really useful, kind of like Shazam for birds. I asked Benjamin if people could use this feature to identify NFCs.
Van Doren: The tools and underlying technology behind something like Merlin, they can be applied to the flight call problem, this flight call challenge, but as you say it is trickier because there’s less information encoded in a 50-millisecond chip than in [a] several-second song of a Northern Cardinal, for example.
So it makes it more difficult for the computer to make the identification accurately, but when you provide enough data, the computer gets good enough that it can hopefully overcome those types of shortcomings.
And so one thing that I’m working on right now is trying to take that next step to develop a system based on some of the same technology that underlies Merlin but applied specifically to the challenge of identifying nocturnal flight calls.
Job: Benjamin is hopeful this tool will be available in the not too distant future. And by creating such a tool, all of a sudden, the problem of ID’ing hard to identify night calls slowly begins to disappear.
And this could help unlock the greatest mysteries of migration.
Van Doren: We currently have a poor understanding of what birds are doing at the species level when they’re actively migrating, and flight calls can give us a window into how birds are interacting with the landscape, how they’re interacting with human-dominated areas like cities, and importantly, tell us how different species are behaving differently in response to the environment, to the landscape and also with each other.
I think there’s a lot that we have yet to learn about how birds are interacting during migration. They’re saying something up there, and in my view, there’s a lot we don't understand about what exactly they’re communicating as they are participating in these journeys of thousands of miles. So being able to monitor birds at such a large scale will provide us the kind of information we need to make informed conservation decisions going forward.
[CLIP: Theme music]
Job: And that’s where we’re headed in our final episode on the Nighttime Bird Surveillance Network. We illuminate some of the threats birds face during migration and how scientists are combining weather radar and night call monitoring to aid migratory bird conservation efforts.
Kyle Horton: It’s really important for us to monitor those passages, especially in a time where birds are facing many different threats.
Things tend to not look amazing for migratory birds right now.
Job: Science, Quickly is produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose and Kelso Harper.
Don’t forget to subscribe to Science, Quickly. And for more in-depth science news, visit ScientificAmerican.com.
Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.
For Scientific American’s Science, Quickly, I’m Jacob Job.
Protestor: It’s a brochure about all the help that’s available for pregnant women.
Bose: I’m pulling up to one of the last clinics in Georgia where you can still get a medical abortion.
Protestor: [tape] It’s a brochure.
Bose: [tape] What’s it a brochure about?
On the way up the road, I’m accosted by an anti-abortion protester who starts vigorously knocking on my Uber window, thrusting a series of flyers with pictures of fetuses in my face.
Protestor: [tape] Are you here for an abortion?
Bose: [tape] Do you think I’m here for an abortion?
Bose: After I reveal that I’m reporting for Scientific American, they try appealing to well, — science.
Protestor: If you actually Google — like a couple of years ago, they interviewed like over 1000 biologists and 96% of them said life begins at conception. First of all you know that women getting abortions, supposedly, supposedly, for health reasons, you know, that's less than 1% of all abortions, right?
Bose: None of this is true. But the language of science, like religion, is fast being weaponized by those opposing abortion access. And — the overturning of Roe vs. Wade is actually affecting Black pregnant people the most.
A new poll from the University of Georgia in October of last year shows that over 86% of Black voters also oppose Georgia’s new restrictions. Let’s add in something else. Of 159 counties in Georgia, 79 don’t even have access to an obstetrician. That means if you need an abortion, that puts you in a position where you might have to drive for miles.
Bose: [tape] How long you traveled from, essentially?
Patient: About an hour and a half.
Bose: And those distances are getting further apart. A clinic manager at the Black-owned Feminist Women’s Health Center told me that pregnant people are now driving to this clinic from as far away as …
Clinic Manager, [tape]: Mississippi, Tennessee, they still, you know. Alabama. Had a couple last Tuesday, Ohio.
Bose: Clinics are now being overbooked to the point of having to turn people away. More clinics are also closing under pressure from abortion bans. And if you are able to make the journey and get an appointment at a clinic, you might even be accosted by armed protestors. The clinic manager, who I’m keeping anonymous for her safety, tells me more stories about the protestors — and what pregnant people have been through with one protester in particular. One that you heard giving us some false statistics at the beginning of this episode.
Clinic Manager: I can see it in their eyes. I say baby, don't let that devil get to you. Don't let what he said, hit you in your spirit. God is a forgiving God, and then I tell them about his history. You burned down a Black church and God forgave you.
Bose: [tape] Wait he burned down a Black church?
Manager: You can google his name and the case comes up as a federal case. Down in Perry, Georgia. Houston County. And he clarified for me it was a Black church. I said, Oh, it was a Black church. Thank you, I said, because I just thought it was a regular church. But thank you, Jason, for letting me know it was a Black church.
Bose: Here’s the thing. Protestors aside, the overturning of Roe in the US added yet another hurdle for Black pregnant people seeking reproductive care.
As you’ll find out — the weaponization of science to promote racism and control Black people’s reproductive health care isn’t new. In fact, you might even say the history of gynecology was intertwined with the desire — once an economic need in the United States — to control Black women’s bodies, using science as an instrument. As a warning, some of the content in this podcast may be triggering for some listeners.
Harriet Washington: Horrific research, actually cutting into their skin to see where the Blackness arose, slicing into their genitalia. These profoundly painful events.
Monica McLemore: Or you could be Serena Williams and you know, you can be getting paid millions to know your own body and to know how it should function, you know, physiologically and still not have people not listen to you or believe you.
Amanda Stevenson: These are the only numbers I have ever calculated that made me cry.
Bose: The links between science, health and racism in the United States are so deeply enmeshed, they go back to the very fabric of gynecology and reproductive health in this country.
In this podcast, we’re going to talk about a perfect storm of factors that have led to the current disparities in maternal health — from the historical links between racism and gynecology, to the systemic erasure of America’s Black midwives, to the current reproductive rights crisis affecting the very people who were robbed of agency in the beginning.
Bose: You’re listening to Racism in Health, a new podcast from Nature and Scientific American.
Stevenson: These are the only numbers I have ever calculated that made me cry.
Bose: That’s Amanda Stevenson, a sociologist from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She wrote a 2021 study in the journal Demography.
Stevenson: Because these are people who are, you know, forced to remain pregnant when they don't want to be and then pay literally the ultimate price for that, pay with their lives.
Bose: Amanda modeled the potential impact of overturning Roe on pregnant people in the US.
Stevenson: I'm a demographer. So what we do is we count things and count them extremely carefully. Basically, we know how many people die after having an abortion in the United States. And we know how many people die while they're pregnant or after they give birth. And so we can use those facts to estimate how many more people would die if everyone who has an abortion instead was forced to remain pregnant.
Stevenson: Among non-Hispanic Black women, I estimate that pregnancy related deaths would increase by a third. So by 33%. People who are Black have experienced higher rates of pregnancy related death and maternal death, then do people from any other race or ethnic category.
Stevenson: Abortion services are needed at higher rates among people who are more disadvantaged. And one of the results of this is that people who are Black, have higher need for abortion services than people who are white, non-Hispanic, Hispanic or from other race-ethnic categories. And a greater fraction of people who are in those categories of needing more abortion services are forced to remain pregnant because they had needed abortion services at greater rates.
Bose: Stevenson’s study was cited all over the news in June of last year when Roe was overturned, but she had actually been working on it since the Summer of 2019. And at that time, she said she was also facing an uphill battle with some of her peers to get it published.
Stevenson: It was rejected like six times. Because nobody, nobody believed that it was ever going to be relevant. Yeah, the reviewers were just like, this is like just absurd.
Bose: A little context around this: Stevenson is a demographer, and her study assumes zero abortions in a post-Roe world, which her peers thought was somewhat unrealistic. But Amanda was still surprised that she faced resistance to such a simple but powerful piece of demography, especially as the possibility of an outright federal ban on abortion grows increasingly plausible.
Stevenson: The point that I was trying to make was not that that is what was going to happen. I was just trying to demonstrate that like when you end abortion, more people die just because staying pregnant is deadly or like that was the whole purpose of the paper.
Bose: It’s also important to note that when Roe legislation did come under direct scrutiny in the Supreme court, during the case of Dobbs v Jackson’s women’s health - scientists did speak up, including Stevenson. In an Amicus brief signed by over 500 public health experts - data, including Amanda’s was presented. And among its many lines of evidence, was a clear message.
Stevenson: If we actually prevent people from getting abortions, we cause more people to die. So that increase in deaths doesn't have to happen.
Bose: Amanda’s now working on another study, using more recent data from the US as it becomes available. As are many other researchers. But, we don’t need to wait for those studies to know that there is more going on here. Amanda’s findings don’t just highlight the disproportionate impact of the overturning of Roe. There’s a deeper problem that’s existed in the USA for a long, long time. And that’s the systemic failure of medicine in the USA — and those in it — when it comes providing healthcare to Black people — especially when it comes to maternal mortality.
Vu-An Foster: ‘My daughter arrived, and she died during birth.’
Bose: This is Vu-An Foster, a Black woman and Master’s of Public Health student — who went through two devastating pregnancy losses, before realizing that they could have been preventable.
Vu-An Foster: I feel like my experience on the labor and delivery floor was amazing, but once they realized that my baby was going to come and was going to die, I felt like they treated me differently. I also had a nurse and I kinda said, what’s going to happen, you know, when I have my baby? And she said, well, you know your baby is gonna die, you’re gonna deliver your baby by yourself.
Bose: For Vu-An, this was shocking and upsetting.
Vu-An Foster: I still was in shock, I didn’t know what was going on. I hadn’t called my family or anything. Everything was happening so fast and I wasn’t even making my own decisions. I heard statistics about infant mortality. But to live it — it’s a totally different experience. The data doesn’t show you, dealing with people who are cold. And not compassionate.
Bose: Vu-An attributes her experience to systemic racism in the health system. But it is a problem which extends even beyond this.
Monica McLemore: One in six pregnant capable people experienced mistreatment during childbirth.
Monica McLemore: That was everything from being shouted at and scolded, you know, by a healthcare provider, violations of privacy. People feeling ignored by their healthcare team, failing to respond to requests for help in a reasonable amount of time. As a nurse, that’s people dinging the call bell light and nobody’s coming to answer, right? That’s directly in the purview of nursing. Threatening to withhold treatment, or forcing people to accept treatment maybe that they didn’t want, right? That was one in six people.
Bose: This study — which they called Giving Voice to Mothers — documented this treatment utilizing a survey of — 2,700 people from varying racial and socio-economic backgrounds. The study found that being a person of color resulted in higher rates of mistreatment. But, it didn’t stop there.
McLemore: What we found was proximity to Blackness was enough for people to be mistreated, even if they themselves were not Black. So, you know, if you had a mom with a mixed race baby and a Black father, there was mistreatment that occurred. So at some point, we have to talk about the proximity to Blackness, being one of those risk factors from this treatment, irrespective of you yourself are or are not Black.
Bose: There have been other studies that also show how racism and anti-Blackness – can affect health outcomes in a maternal setting.
McLemore: That has to do with the fact that there's anti-Blackness embedded in how people think about other humans in our country.
Bose: This anti-Blackness manifests in a host of ways, for example, a 2020 study published in the journal of racial and ethnic health disparities found that Black women were more likely to undergo unnecessary C-sections — which have greater risks of complications for pregnant people.
Bose: Many chalk these disparities up to socio-economic status, and the quality of hospitals. And it’s true that these factors play an important role. But it’s far from the whole story. Monica told me about someone she admired, but never got to meet. Shalon Irving, who collapsed and died three weeks after giving birth.
Monica McLemore: For a lot of people who've read about it, they know she was a dual doctorate, I knew her work, she was working at the CDC studying this exact issue. For me it was not hypothetical.
Monica McLemore: I thought to myself, Wow, if you can have two PhDs or Dr, pH and doctorate and really be working on this issue, and still have clinicians, not pay attention to your symptoms, still have multiple visits to health care providers where things got missed, and then to end up dying from the very condition that you were studying.
Bose: And — Shalon Irving was far from the only wealthy, informed Black woman who experienced trauma while giving birth. For example tennis pro Serena Williams almost died when doctors didn’t believe her when she said she was having a pulmonary embolism. These stories are reflected in data, too. According to a 2016 study Black, college educated mothers who gave birth were more likely to suffer complications than white women who never graduated from high school.
Monica McLemore: I can't believe we have lost an iconic leader, a thought leader, a scholar, you know, in this work, for the very reasons why people can't clearly see why structural racism in healthcare is such a problem and why health equity is so necessary and crucial. Because if we don't rethink training, our clinical health care workforce, this will continue to happen. That, to me, was a huge wake up call.
Bose: Given that wealthy, informed Black women are experiencing this level of difficulty, Monica’s really worried about groups that are even more vulnerable.
Monica McLemore: Poor women have no chance.
Bose: As we heard in the last episode, there are a myriad of ways that people have injected racism into the healthcare system — including among practitioners themselves. But — to get to the root of the problem, you have to dig deeper. To find the rot at the heart of the system. And one core example of this can be seen in a particularly insidious concept in the medical literature. It’s one that still manifests now when Black people ask for help in a clinical setting, and are denied. That’s the myth that Black people do not feel pain.
Washington: That claim is not peculiar to Black women, it was ascribed to all African Americans. All African Americans were judged to not feel pain.
Bose: This is Harriet Washington, a medical historian and ethicist who wrote the book Medical Apartheid.
Washington: The rather shaky theory being that their nervous systems are too primitive and poorly organized to register pain.
Bose: And historically, the concept of pain was quite different.
Washington: In the 19th century, to say that someone didn't feel pain was to say other things as well. It was believed then that anxiety, heart disease, these things are predicated on the same neurological insufficiencies. So not just he didn't feel pain, the belief was that they didn't feel mental illness. They didn't commit suicide, they didn't feel anxiety, as whites would.
Bose: This myth was heavily leaned on to justify slavery.
Washington: The practical advantage of this belief, which of course is untrue, but was widely embraced by medicine was that if you had a being that didn’t feel pain, one could ethically justify, in their minds at least, subjecting them to pain - You could take this person and work them in mercifully in the hot subtropical sun, you could never do that to a white person who might suffer sudden stroke who might feel pain and exhaustion. But African Americans were supposedly exempt from that.
Washington: Dr. James Marion Simms very typically said he had cured vaginal fistula by his experimental surgeries on enslaved Black women. Enslaved black women simply could not say no.
Bose: Sims, as Washington told me, had a very specific economic reason for wanting to cure obstetric fistula in Black women.
Washington: The problem with Black women from the medical point of view was that they couldn't work if they had this. So Simms knew that curing this would make his fame and fortune.
Bose: And to seek this fortune - Sims experimented on enslaved Black women, many of them multiple times. And he did it without the use of anesthesia. I’ll stop right here for a trigger warning. This might be hard for some listeners.
Washington: Horrific research, actually cutting into their skin to see where the blackness arose, slicing into their genitalia. To try to find a treatment for vestical vaginal fistula. These profoundly painful events could be justified by these doctors, in their view, at least, because subjects didn't feel any pain.
Bose: There’s a famous painting showing Simms work, by Robert Thom. It depicts a Black woman, fully clothed, her hand to her breast, surrounded by a few attending doctors. And Sims. But that picture doesn’t even begin to represent the experiments that Sims actually carried out.
Washington: In reality, according to Simms own writings, the women were naked, and the two men and the other surgeons were there, in part to hold them down. As they screamed and tried to get away — while Sims sliced into their genitalia, a very ugly, horrific scene.
Bose: But these horrific experiments did lead Sims to a discovery.
Washington: Eventually, Sims hit upon the idea of using silver sutures to sew the wounds together. He’d sew the holes together, and the silver sutures did not harbor bacteria, did not harbor bacteria, and they actually worked.
Washington: He did not linger to suture the other openings and cured women. He immediately left for Paris and New York City where he made a medical fortune. He was lionized there, adulated and became the President of the American Medical Society.
Bose: It was through research by prominent figures like Sims that the idea that Black people didn’t feel pain became accepted within scientific circles. Even though men were literally employed to hold Black women down as they screamed.
Washington: So, it was a false belief, but it was too profitable to abandon.
Bose: And the myth that Black women don’t experience pain —
Washington: Yes, it exists today.There have been a bevy of well conducted studies showing that if you take Black people and white people with the same medical profile — the same medical history, whites will be offered effective analgesia and Black people are not only denied painkillers, because they don't feel pain. Their claims of pain are not believed. But they also are labeled as drug seeking.
Bose: This misconception also persists among those that work in the medical sector. For example, a study from the University of Virginia in 2016 asked medical students about their understanding of pain and race.
Washington: Half of all medical student respondents did not believe the Black patients felt pain the way whites did. So did a lot of practicing physicians. And so this belief has been remarkably persistent.
Bose: Monica Mclemore too has seen this on the clinic floor and even in textbooks. Over and over and over again.
McLemore: I started my baccalaureate degree in nursing in 1988. And I have been asked to review nursing textbooks that, you know, have been in print since I was a nursing student that still recycle, you know, stereotypes and myths about Black people, Black patients.
McLemore: This notion that we would even think that race would somehow mediate pain is odd. Pain is a universal human experience, right? So this idea that somehow some members of our species actually wouldn't experience pain. It's just so odd to me. And yeah, I know that that's taught to people.
Bose: Monica’s a scientist, but she’s also been a nurse since 1993. And since racism has been happening for so long in our society, there’s something that people — and sometimes the medical community itself — do to justify it when the elephant in the room is as deeply embedded in something we hold as sacred as healthcare.
McLemore: We were called, you know, crack Mamas, you know, welfare queens in the 80s. And for some people, those structural racist stereotypes continue to perpetuate; it's easy to blame Black mothers for their health outcomes and further death. Oh, well, if she wasn't obese, oh, well, if she wasn't, you know, it's older, sicker, fatter, right? It’s that whole paper that I wrote about this. When any individual level risk factor alone is not sufficient to explain poor outcomes at a population level.
Bose: In the US, blaming Black pregnant people starts to look a lot like mass gaslighting. From a scientific perspective, risk factors for individual cases just don’t result in population level disparities like this - that’s just not how statistics work. And that’s before we consider that many individual risk factors that cause poorer health outcomes for Black women while giving birth aren’t actually in control of patients at all.
McLemore: When you think about food apartheid, or having access to, you know, fruits and vegetables and healthy food, right? I mean, that is contingent upon if you can afford it.
Bose: And this is especially important to pregnant people — who are carrying a child for months in the environment that they live in.
McLemore: We act like the only environment that matters is the uterus, or the body of the pregnant person, when we live in a whole world that has other kinds of exposures that we know that influence pregnancy outcomes. If you're in, you know, Flint, Michigan, or you're in Mississippi, and you have no clean water, or as all of us are going to painfully find out, if we don't do something about climate crisis — we know that heat exposure, you know, is associated with prematurity.
Bose: Monica says these external factors are often disregarded as soon as a person becomes pregnant.
McLemore: For too long pregnant people have been thought about as vessels or some, you know, means to an end, where pregnant people are exclusively responsible for the environment in which we gestate new humans. Why are Black women being blamed for their obstetric outcomes? Because I would argue that we have a health system that blames pregnant people as individuals, for their outcomes, instead of the structural problems.
And here’s the thing — cardiovascular conditions are among the biggest risk factors for people giving birth.They’re also cited as a reason Black pregnant people have higher rates of maternal mortality. As we’ve seen, there are compounding factors stacked against Black pregnant people. In addition, the tendency to blame women, especially Black women, for their outcomes extends even further to their chances of getting pregnant in the first place. Here’s Jennifer Barber, a researcher who focuses on racial disparities and something called contraceptive deserts.
Barber: I collected data on 1,000 18 and 19 year old women in a county in Michigan, Genesee County, it's where Flint, Michigan is located… One thing we found in this study is that the pharmacies that the Black women in the study live close to are open fewer hours per week than the pharmacies that the young white women move close to. And so that overall makes them less convenient.
Barber: So young Black women in our study tended to choose condoms over oral contraceptive pills, while the young white women tended to choose oral contraceptive pills over condoms.
Bose: And Barber has a few ideas as to why.
Barber: Black women are less likely than white women to have insurance that covers prescription contraceptive methods. [and] They have good reason to be wary of the whole healthcare, medical establishment. You know, there's a long history of abuse of the Black population by that system. And so I think they have reasonable worries about having to interact with clinicians in order to get contraception — and so it makes sense that they would want to rely on methods that don't require a clinical visit.
Bose: And what all this translates into is more unwanted pregnancies, because Black women are more likely to have to rely on contraception methods like condoms.
Barber: Those methods are just difficult, because they require the cooperation of a partner. And they have to be implemented sort of, in the moment at the time of intercourse. They're tedious for one or another reasons, condoms are messy. They're sort of, I would say, not cheap, if you have intercourse relatively frequently, like young women tend to do. You know, for a variety of reasons, it's just more difficult to use those methods. And so if we saw white women needing to rely on those methods like Black women do, we would see higher rates of unwanted pregnancies among white women as well.
Barber: It's not a failure of Black women to use contraception as well as white women, it's that they use contraception that is much more difficult to use consistently, correctly, and all the time.
Bose: And this has devastating and unequal results.
Barber: Black women who want to avoid pregnancy are getting pregnant at three times the rate of the white women who want to avoid a pregnancy.
Bose: Which means that these new state-wide abortion laws — often made by white men — will be affecting the bodies of Black women who often never had a choice.
Barber: The combination of Black women having more pregnancies that they might like to abort, and the danger of giving birth for black women means that the striking down of Roe versus Wade is literally a life and death situation for Black women.
Bose: We’ve seen that racism has impacted almost every part of the American healthcare system, resulting in devastating outcomes. But what about the formation of the American medical establishment itself? For example - the maternal healthcare system in the United states, looks distinctly different from many other high income-countries. For example - the US doesn’t really use midwives anymore. And if you look back through history - that also has everything to do with racism. Here’s Harriet Washington again.
Washington: There were actually no gynecologists in the 19th century.
Bose: You see, before the formal field of gynecology there was still maternal healthcare. Some of it was performed by poorly trained white male doctors, but also by enslaved Black midwives. These women brought their practices to the United States, and their skill was specifically revered.
Washington: Black midwives, Black healers were so successful, and helping women bear children without horrible after effects like obstetric fistulae, and without child death, that not only Black women, but also white women would often prefer their administrations.
Washington: And white doctors responded by vilifying Black midwives. They were not white. That was an indictment in itself. They also were African, unChristian. They also were uneducated. That was a common criticism. But if you've looked at training of white doctors, it was actually rather brief, especially when it came to women's issues, so they weren't terribly well educated themselves.
Bose: The vilification of Black midwives and healers grew over the coming decades — eventually, spreading to all female clinicians.
Washington: And this competition, it became increasingly bitter. After a while Black midwives and other Black healers were at risk of being punished and executed when their patients didn't fare well. They'd be accused of poisoning. They’d be accused of killing patients.
While we can’t say to what extent this is down to the use or non use of midwives — what we can say is that, if it wasn’t for the racist, self-interested motivations of early 19th century white doctors, and the subsequent erasure of Black medical practitioners — the landscape of maternal healthcare in North America might look quite different today. Something to think about. We’ve talked a lot about Black maternal mortality rates. But — to get a really clear picture, it’s also really important to take a look at the raw numbers. Let’s take a look at the actual number of women that die per year from childbirth. Here’s Henning Tiemeier, a Professor of Social and Behavioral Science at the school of Maternal and Child Health at Harvard University, explaining an exercise he uses with his students.
Henning Tiemeier: I asked the students to guess how many women die per year in absolute numbers in during childbirth, and the year after, or ask them in the first 42 days, which is often the definition used. And then I asked them to think whether it's 808,000 or 80,000 per year. And believe it or not, many of my students say it's 8000, or even more, why is actually 800, I can use 800. So, but this is important for the students to realize that something which is so much of the media is actually 800. And then I, we I say is it as overplayed that we make all this fuss for something which is so rare events?
Bose: It’s true - the numbers on the face of it may not look high, especially when looking at the mortality rates around diseases like Covid, for example. But Henning has a response.
Tiemeier: It's not a disease, it should not be a single. It's, it's all unnecessary.
Bose: Henning has another exercise he likes to use, as well.
Tiemeier: I start with a slide which gives the terminal mortality per 100,000 per race. This is always a shock. But actually, most students know it, and we start a conversation. And then I tell them that this slide is actually not from the US, but from the UK. And it is the same, it's the same, it's exactly the same.
Tiemeier: The UK has definitely very strong elements in maternal care. So the midwifery system, so midwives, is spectacularly well organized, it's very successful, and is one of the reasons that they have a reasonably low mortality rate. So let's give them credit for that. But the racial differences, equally dramatic. So that's indeed a problem.
Tiemeier: So, um, I think, um .. I think we have to start with, um, racism and discrimination?? We know that discrimination does cause poor health and not only mental health, but also physical health in many different ways .
Washington: I had given a talk at the Academy of Medicine right across the street. And when I finished the talk a medical student jumped her feet and said we have a tear that statue down. It took 10 years. I was there when it was carted away.
Bose: But the removal of the statue is far from a sign that the problems — the lionization of Simms — and the legacy of the racist bias in medicine – are over.
Washington: And I was struck by the fact that there were many people there, who were angry about the fact the statue had been taken down, defending Sims.
Bose: Harriet wrote an article in Nature in response to one such poorly worded and racist editorial, also published by Nature in 2017.
Washington: There had been other reports, you know, essays written in journals like Nature of people defending Simms, and complaining that the statue shouldn't be taken down because you're trying to rewrite history. And I thought, you know, in a way, they're right, we are trying to rewrite history, we're trying to correct it.
Yet while early practitioners like Sims and his research caused immense harm, researchers like Amanda Stevenson, Harriet Washington, and Monica Mclemore are raising the profile of these issues through their work to quantify these disparities. Part of this podcast has also been about the mission of re-platforming scholars and activists.
McLemore: We have technologies and tools that we didn't have prior to Roe. We have an activated and educated populace. We have reproductive justice and reproductive justice informed clinicians and advocates and strategists and community organizers.
Bose: The fall of Roe, just like Covid, has created a lens that zoomed in on existing inequalities. And it’s up to many in science and medicine to fix it, and it’s up to those of us in science journalism to amplify people that are. Not only that — but publications like Nature and Scientific American need to look back through their pages, and learn from their mistakes too.
Bose: Maybe science can be a force for good, this time.
This has been Racism in Health, a podcast from Nature and Scientific American. This episode was produced, narrated, and reported by me, Tulika Bose, with additional reporting from Megan McDonough and Nick Petric Howe. Sound design was by me, with editing help from Noah Baker, Jeff DelViscio, and Chrissy Yates. We’d also like to thank guest editor Melissa Nobles who has provided invaluable advice and guidance in the production of this podcast.
Meg Duff: Last week, if you missed it, I was up in Harvard Forest, learning about a hidden economy: underneath our feet, plants and fungi are constantly trading carbon and nutrients.
Duff: Trees use carbon as currency to trade with fungi.
Scientists have figured out that they can watch this nutrient economy in action by reading the chemical signatures in the leaves of trees. Those signatures help predict what's going on in the soil, where trees trade with mycorrhizal fungi through their roots.
Next, scientists are planning to get that underground fungi data from space, using satellites.
Renato Braghiere: We will be able to immediately know, “What does mycorrhizae look like in the whole planet?” which is pretty exciting.
Duff: That’s Renato Braghiere, a climate scientist who models how carbon cycles through forests. These modeling advances are super exciting.
Braghiere: And so we could start asking questions about ... “Are these mycorrhizal types actually shifting in space as we predicted?”
Duff: On one level, we already know what these models will show us….
Braghiere: Yes, we’re expecting that the system will crash because the system will change or the conditions for this symbiotic relationship will change in the near future in terms of environmental conditions, and also the locations of the planet that they are.
Duff: Because we keep burning fossil fuels and adding extra carbon to the atmosphere, plants are starting to experience inflation. If their nutrient economy slows down, forests won’t be able to pull as much carbon out of the atmosphere. That means we have less leeway to keep adding it.
Braghiere: I think if we add more data into it, we’ll have a better answer in terms of certainty but not a better answer in terms of the time we have to take action and actually limit our carbon emissions.
Duff: Renato isn’t super optimistic about our ability to limit emissions quickly.
Braghiere: But I’m just a climate scientist. I’m very, you know, yeah, we’re not very optimistic with the future just because of what our models tell us.
Duff: Can climate models actually help us to change our behavior? That’s not a question about scientific advancements but about human decision-making.
To look for answers, I reached out to a climate scientist who—amazingly enough—is still a little bit hopeful.
Regina Rodrigues: I am Regina Rodrigues. I am a professor of Physical Oceanography and Climate at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Southern Brazil.
[CLIP: Jungle sounds and dog barking]
Duff: And that’s her Westie dog, Whiskey, barking at the monkeys.
Regina Rodrigues: He hates the monkeys, to be honest. He barks a lot. He’s a terrier.... They come to the garden to steal our tangerines, and they already came last Tuesday for a visit.... [laughs] my dog doesn’t like that.
[CLIP: Jungle sounds]
Duff: Regina lives next to a forest reserve. But unlike at Harvard Forest, no one here has mapped the relationship between all the trees and their mycorrhizal fungi. The funding just isn’t there.
Rodrigues: Brazil doesn’t have the money to invest in research that will not bring an immediate, obvious benefit to society. It’s much more difficult to sponsor blue sky research.
Duff: But Regina is determined and may eventually be able to map and study this forest, and forests like it, from space by combining data from satellites with machine learning.
Rodrigues: Here in Brazil we don’t have too much data, but maybe machine learning can help, artificial intelligence of any kind, can actually help to extrapolate this information.
[CLIP: Music]
Duff: Today’s global climate models simulate the whole world—but each pixel is about the size of Rhode Island. Without better local data, local policymakers have frustratingly limited insight and global projections are full of uncertainty.
To solve for those limitations, researchers are turning to satellite data to make some amazing breakthroughs.
Looking under the soil from space is just the beginning. Modelers are also tracking the changing colors in Saharan dust, the species of plankton in sea spray and the daily rates of photosynthesis—literally watching forests breathe. Essentially, they’re trying to model everything.
Rodrigues: This is a new frontier that we want to get to with modeling... is this digital Earth. It’s basically [to] simulate Earth in a computer model, mimic Earth in all aspects. The idea of having that working ... is that eventually, say, a policymaker wants to make a decision about something ... and ... can go to this digital Earth and experiment to it and choose pathways of climate change, and what is the outcome ... if I choose, say, less emission with the policies that I have, for instance, what will be the outcome of that? That’s the ultimate goal.
Duff: Regina works with the World Climate Research Program, which coordinates climate modeling worldwide. And she thinks these advances are exciting. She told me that more accurate models could really help with decision-making—eventually. But she also has doubts.
Rodrigues: We don’t have the time.... I don’t think we have the time to wait seven more years or 10 more years to get a better model.... If that’s gonna take so long, in this time, a lot of people are going to be affected and maybe even lose their lives.
Duff: She’s also worried about access.
Rodrigues: If this information [is] in such a form that is so complex that only us scientists can have access, then this is no use, you see...? It is exciting that we are in this frontier now..., but there is a bad side to it because it’s expensive. It ends up leaving a lot of people out of the equation..., and this information is not available for the people who need it most, and that’s a big problem.
Duff: A lot of people trying to make climate decisions, Regina told me, don’t have the training or resources to use the data we already have.
Rodrigues: I would say information for short, short-term decisions are very important now. Here in my town, we have floods, we have extratropical cyclones..., but the authorities and the communities don’t have this data available for ... dealing with these problems in a better way.... So we needed to develop things that are simpler and more accessible.... We needed to just make this information useful and available to the people that matter.
Duff: In the short term, she says, we already know enough to act. But scientists need to be better at getting local decision-makers the information they need.
Rodrigues: If the small thing can deliver now..., I mean, maybe the information that we have, we can use it as best we can.
Duff: The problem is: that’s not necessarily how scientists are trained to think.
Rodrigues: But it’s not that, let’s say..., prestigious to do this type of science.... As a scientist..., we are trained to ... always look for the cutting edge, right?
Duff: Scientists are trained to chase discoveries and advances, not to slow down and train end users. So Regina has been thinking about a paradigm shift. And the metaphor she keeps coming back to as she’s been mulling this over is a metaphor about mycorrhizal fungi and trees.
Big science, she says, with its fancy, cutting-edge models, is like the tree. Like trees collect energy from the sun, these projects collect attention and funding.
Rodrigues: Sometimes there is much more prestige of the aboveground, the majestic trunk of the trees, the money, the sun, but.... I guess we need both. And that’s what we are trying to do is the below ground network, the small-is-beautiful.
Duff: At the World Climate Research Program, Regina is working on an initiative to create local climate hubs. She imagines these hubs trading information with researchers like mycorrhizal fungi trade with trees: they can use the data from big science make good decisions while also feeding back insights.
Rodrigues: In my town, if these people that work with very little resources, but they can actually use the information, learn a little bit with us, and vice versa, then we can help them, and they can help us to help them.
Duff: One example she gave was of a hub of researchers working across borders in the Himalayan region. They are using advanced climate models to coordinate emergency response around glacial floods despite all the political tensions in the region.
Rodrigues: China, India, Pakistan and Nepal, Tibet..., we know that in a higher level these countries, some, particularly in that region, are very delicate.
Duff: But when local leaders collaborate on emergency response, she says ...
Rodrigues: These differences disappeared in that level. It’s not that complicated, see.
Duff: Regina hopes that if more local people have the information that can help them adapt to the impact of climate change, that could also translate into more grassroots pressure to reduce emissions. She is more optimistic about that approach than she is about solutions where scientists try to convince world leaders directly.
Rodrigues: Mitigation is more high-level because it’s something that all the countries have to agree and do it, and it will not work if just one or two countries do it..., and I’m not seeing the progress that we need to happen. And, and that is what concerned me. And that’s why I’m optimistic that this other way, the bottom-up, is the best way…
Duff: To Regina, good climate decision-making is less about gathering perfect data and more about using the data we already have. Any access to climate models and data training at the local level should support action and inspire change.
Maybe building out this metaphorical mycorrhizal network of climate hubs will help pressure politicians to limit emissions, thereby fixing the inflation problem in the real-world-plant-fungi economy. But whether or not Regina’s work can have that impact, she hopes it will at least help communities adapt, keeping people safer in the short term.
Rodrigues: From that point on, they actually manage to get the climate information that they need and make that climate information useful to improve the lives of people, reduce the vulnerability of the people or increase their resilience to climate change and the impacts—and we can spread this and have these hubs everywhere, and this actually improves the lives of people. This would be the success.
Duff: For Science, Quickly, I’m Meg Duff. Science, Quickly is produced by Tulika Bose, Jeff DelViscio, Kelso Harper and Carin Leong. Edited by Elah Feder and Alexa Lim. Music is by Dominic Smith.
You can listen to Science, Quickly wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t forget to go to ScientificAmerican.com to get the most up-to-date and in-depth science news.
Meg Duff: The town of Petersham, Massachusetts is leafy. It’s green. It is not the business capital of anything. It’s not a place anyone associates with cutting-edge economic research. But there is a research forest here, where scientists study the economic dynamics of forest ecosystems. And at the edge of the forest, there’s a little greenhouse on a hill.
[CLIP: Footsteps]
Duff: This is where I came to learn about the surprising economic actors in a hidden economy that we are still just beginning to understand. This economy is being reshaped by climate change … and without it, we might not even be alive.
My name is Meg Duff, and you’re listening to Science, Quickly.
[CLIP: Intro music]
Jenny Bhatnagar: These are saplings, oak saplings, and we’re planting them in pots. We’re doing a big greenhouse experiment.
Duff: That’s Jenny Bhatnagar, an associate professor of biology at Boston University. She and her colleagues are in the Harvard Forest greenhouse setting up an experiment to study an underground economy. And when I say underground I do mean that literally, because under our feet, plants and fungi are constantly trading.
Bhatnagar: Oh, the trees provide the fungus with sugar. And in exchange, the fungus provides the tree with nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium, sulfate, water, etcetera.
Duff: A fungus is like a mullet. As Jenny put it, there’s a business end and a party end.
Bhatnagar: The mushroom is the party end.... It only makes a mushroom when the conditions are right.
Duff: But I’m here to see the business end: these tiny underground threads that run throughout the soil, collecting nutrients.
Bhatnagar: So I’m opening up a cooler.... So this is a cooler full of soil.... And look, see all that white?
Duff (tape): Wait, that little ...
Bhatnagar: That white is fungus. It’s not plastic.
Duff (tape): It looks like plastic!
Bhatnagar: It’s not. And you can see they grow on the tips of the roots. See, right there..., see this yellow? That’s an ectomycorrhizal fungus that’s colonizing the roots of the oaks.
Duff: Mycorrhizae are these long threadlike fungi that connect to the roots of plants. This network is often called the “wood wide web” because it facilitates communication in the forest. But there is also an economic relationship between plants and these fungi: During photosynthesis, plants collect carbon from the atmosphere. And some of it, they trade it to fungi.
Bhatnagar: Tree roots are not very good at getting nutrients and water for themselves.
Duff: Because of that, many trees trade with fungi to get resources they can’t otherwise reach. Jenny says that if they don’t have as many fungi to trade with, trees don’t do as well: they’re often smaller, less resilient to stress and less likely to survive. So the experiment Jenny’s working on is about trying to get more mycorrhizal fungi into urban soil. Yeah.
Duff (tape): So then these little sidewalk trees ...
Bhatnagar: They don’t have a lot..., and so we don’t know. We don’t know how the trees are able to live in the city.... We think they grow fast..., but then they die young.
Duff: Because they don’t have as many fungi to trade with, city trees live more of a subsistence lifestyle. Forest trees just have more resources. Or—they have had, for most of the time forests have existed. But recently, their “economy” has been changing, too. And unfortunately, it’s been changing in ways that will probably feel really familiar—because trees, like us, have been experiencing inflation.
[CLIP: Music]
Renato Braghiere: The fungi are interested in the carbon that plants produce, and the plants will pay out this carbon to the fungi, and in turn, the fungi will mobilize, searching for nutrients, and return these nutrients to the plants.
Duff: To learn more, I called up Renato Braghiere, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology and at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who has been modeling the plant-fungi economy.
Braghiere: It’s a win-win situation.... We can see carbon as this currency that plants use to benefit from fungi ...
Duff: Except for one thing: For the past few hundred years, humans have been burning fossil fuels—filling the air with more carbon for plants to capture. But the fungi don’t always have more nutrients to trade.
Braghiere: Eventually the fungi will scavenge soil looking for nutrients, and they will just find it’s harder to gather the same amount of nutrients that the plants are requiring.
Duff: Since the supply of nutrients can’t keep up with demand, fungi are raising their prices. And even though plants have more carbon to spend, it’s just not going as far.
Braghiere: We’re kind of causing this inflation into this trade that has been working for so many years.
Duff: You heard that right. Like us, plants are experiencing inflation. For a few million years, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were pretty stable. But since the industrial revolution—and especially in the past few decades—humans have added lots more, essentially devaluing the plants’ currency. To oversimplify, there are really two options for what happens next. Just as in the human world, the plant economy could course correct or it could crash. Obviously, the crash scenario is not great for the plants.
Braghiere: Because they don’t have nutrients, the photosynthetic rates will decrease.
Duff: Like Jenny’s street trees, forest trees may begin to grow more slowly, reproduce less often and then die young. That’s also bad for the fungi because they get less carbon. And it’s really bad for us, too, because we benefit when forests store carbon.
Braghiere: So one third of ... the atmospheric CO2 that we put up there gets absorbed by the land. And if the system crashes, this, this fraction, third, can go down.
Duff: By absorbing our carbon dioxide, plants and fungi have actually been helping to slow global warming. That’s why planting trees is such a popular climate solution. To use an economic term, the land sink for carbon is one of the things we factor into our global “carbon budget”—which helps us decide how much carbon we can burn without overshooting climate goals. And Renato says that if it weren’t for this inconvenient problem of inflation ...
Braghiere: We would have plants assimilating more and more and more carbon forever, and we will just see a very, very strong sink of carbon in the land surface.
Duff: But, he says, that’s probably not what we should expect. Nutrient limits, along with other challenges, like droughts and fires, paint a different picture.
Braghiere: From the end of the century on, it seems like projections are saying that this productivity will start to decrease. And eventually... the land can turn into a carbon source instead of a carbon sink. And then the feedback into the climate system will just amplify and accelerate climate change, which will be a disaster.
Duff: So that’s what the models say right now. But there’s still a lot of uncertainty.
Braghiere: Like, inflation in economics is really hard to predict.... The future is uncertain for mainly two different reasons. There’s the uncertainty in the processes that we represent in these models. But there’s also the uncertainty in the pathways that humans will take. So we might cut emissions by 2030, and then the climate system would take other pathways.
Duff: If humans keep burning fossil fuels and printing more money for the plants, we are making the “crash” scenario a lot more likely. But we still don’t know how the plants and the fungi will respond.
Braghiere: Yes, we’re expecting that the system will crash.... It’s also important to say that nature has this incredible capacity to adapt.
Duff: There are a few different scenarios that could play out. Among the millions of species of fungi, there may be winners and losers. But some may actually do really well with different carbon prices. Best case scenario, those fungi help forests adapt.
Braghiere: Because now the price of carbon nutrient is different, one species of fungi can benefit from a different price.... We might see a shift in the composition of different types of fungi that associate with different types of plants.
Duff: But those changes may not come quickly enough. And if those plant fungi partnerships change, that could also change these economies in other ways too ...
Braghiere: That could have a cascading effect to the entire biodiversity of that ecosystem as well.
Duff: Here’s the annoying thing, though: it’s really hard to get good data on underground economies. And that’s even more true when the economy is actually underground—when it’s all happening under a layer of dirt. Right now Renato is extrapolating from a few research forests, like the one I visited. The problem: these forests are mostly near well-funded universities in the U.S. and Europe. So tropical rainforests are underrepresented.
Braghiere: So, at the moment, we set one carbon nutrient price per mycorrhizal type all across the world, but we might just end up with extra data realizing that ... in one part of the globe, the symbiotic relationship has a different cost than other parts of the globe.
Duff: Right now Renato’s models use some very back-of-the-envelope assumptions about what’s going on under the soil. And he thinks a crash is by far the most likely scenario. But to be certain, we need better data on which fungi are where and how their relationships are shifting.
In the next episode, we’ll explore how researchers are getting those data. Because, as it turns out, they are in fact mapping these nearly invisible underground fungi. Here’s the wild part: now, they’re figuring out how to do that from space.
For Scientific American’s Science, Quickly, I’m Meg Duff.
Science, Quickly is produced by Tulika Bose, Jeff DelViscio and Kelso Harper. Edited by Eleh Feder and Alexa Lim. Music by Dominic Smith.
