The Science That Captivated SciFri’s Reporters In 2024

Two SciFri producers discuss the year’s most intriguing stories, from new weight-loss drugs to PFAS chemicals to the ManhattAnt.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ira Flatow?

  Science Friday is supported by MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:16Flora Lichtman?

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• 1:06Speaker 02

  From Mars to Manhattan, we've been covering the biggest science stories of the year. It's a job that requires a lot of research and also some tricky pronunciations.

• 1:16Speaker 03

  This PFAS stands for perfluoro and polyfluoro alkyl substances.

• 1:21Ira Flatow?

  Very good.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  It's Monday, December 30, and this is Science Friday.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  I'm John Dankoski, and as this year closes down, we're looking back at what was a very busy year in science news. Recently, Ira Flatow sat down with two of our show's producers at WNYC Radio's Green Space. It was in front of a live crowd. Let's take a listen.

• 1:45Ira Flatow?

  Let me welcome them. Charles Berquist, Science Friday's director, senior producer, and our unofficial radio story archivist. Welcome, Charles.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  Hey, Ira.

• 1:56Ira Flatow?

  Kathleen Davis, who is our audio producer, state of science champion, and fill-in host. When I'm not there, she does a great job. Kathleen, welcome.

• 2:05Speaker 04

  Hi.

• 2:05Ira Flatow?

  Great to have you.

• 2:06Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:09Ira Flatow?

  All right, so I'll just start going down the row this way with you Kathleen. Let's start with that story that many of our listeners may have experienced themselves. This April's total solar eclipse.

• 2:19Speaker 04

  Yes, April 8th was a big day for a lot of us. North America was really lucky. We were, we experienced this total solar eclipse. So just a little science reminder, this is when the moon passes between the sun and the earth and it can block out some of the light. It's also such a great communal event. I love eclipses because you get the little glasses and everyone is just standing in the street or in a field just looking up.

• 2:44Ira Flatow?

  I spent it in a parking lot out of CVS and it wasn't working.

• 2:47Speaker 04

  Right, no matter where you are, they're a blast. So more than 30 million people in North America were in the path of totality. And so that included places like Buffalo and Indianapolis and also down in Texas, a few cities. Even if you weren't in the path of totality, like here in New York, we, New York City, we had, I think about 89% coverage, but it's still an amazing event. And so if you did miss this one, you're in luck because the next total solar eclipse is in August of 2026. And you have time to plan your trip because apparently the best places to see this will be in Greenland, Iceland and Spain. So if you ask me, that sounds like the best time to, to plan a vacation.

• 3:32Ira Flatow?

  I know one out of the three places I will likely go to. Charles, but we did get some less than stellar news from NASA about the Ingenuity Mars helicopter. Tell us what that was.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right, Ira. I mean, you may recall, the nickname was Ginny, but I always thought of this little helicopter as just like this scrappy little guy somehow. And it's really a kind of a reminder of why you shouldn't personify your space robots. Because I felt like, you know, I was really sad when it ended, right? Just to remind people, this is a little helicopter that went to Mars strapped to the bottom of the Perseverance rover, landed in 2021. And it was really small. It was like four foot rotor span, I guess you'd say, and weighed about four pounds. And the original idea of this was just to be like a demonstration, right? They weren't actually trying to get science out of this.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  They said, we're going to fly it maybe five times over the course of a month. See if we can answer the important question, can you fly a helicopter on Mars? Because the atmosphere is so much thinner than it is here. They really didn't know if it would work. Turns out it did work. And they managed to fly it about 72 times over the course of about three years.

• 4:47Ira Flatow?

  Wow.

• 4:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, you know, once they figured out that this was working, they said, you know, we can actually use the helicopter to scout out places for the rovers to go. Or, you know, see where in Jezero Crater we might want to go next. And they also sort of started testing its limits, right? What if we know that it can fly? Can it do this? Can it do this other thing? But then in January of 2024, it had a hard landing during one of its missions, broke a rotor, and that pretty much ended the mission.

• 5:18Ira Flatow?

  I hate when that happens. You know, but, but as most things that NASA has sent to Mars, it really outlived its original estimate, right?

• 5:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you're trying for five flights, you get 72? That's, that's not bad.

• 5:29Ira Flatow?

  I'll take that all the time. Charles, back here on Earth, there's been more news and crises related to our drinking water. The EPA finalized the first ever national limits on acceptable PFAS levels in drinking water. And people are still experiencing issues with access to clean water around the country, right?

• 5:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think this year really has been one of both increasing awareness of these chemicals, but also increased efforts to try and do something about them.

• 6:00Ira Flatow?

  And PFAS is what?

• 6:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this PFAS stands for perfluoro and polyfluoro alkyl substances.

• 6:08Ira Flatow?

  Very good.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  Which basically means you've got a long chain of carbons with a lot of carbon fluorine bonds along it. And those carbon fluorine bonds are super strong. They're hard to break. That's part of what made these substances so useful for things like flame retardants and stain repellents. They were used in tons of things for years. But because those bonds are so hard to break, it also means that once those chemicals are made, they stay around in the environment for a long, long time. So now they're, they're in the earth, they're in the water, they're in breast milk, they're in the blood samples of pretty much everybody in this room. And they have been linked to health problems.

• 6:52Ira Flatow?

  Right.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  So as you mentioned in April, the EPA said, we are finally going to put hard limits on six of these chemicals that cannot be higher than a certain level in your drinking water. They also said that they're going to give a billion dollars to municipalities to help water treatment plants either filter or try and test for these chemicals.

• 7:15Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, that's good news, at least.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  It is good news. There's a lot to be done still. A couple of weeks ago, we reported on some researchers who had come up with a new light-activated catalyst that actually can try and break that carbon fluorine bond that I talked about. It's not ready for prime time yet, but it, these efforts to try and clean up the PFAS instead of just filtering it out are definitely a good sign.

• 7:41Ira Flatow?

  Charles, you got an A in chemistry, I'm sure.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  I did.

• 7:44Ira Flatow?

  At college. Catherine, let's, let's talk a little about the advances in healthcare and medicine. The first CRISPR-based therapy was approved by the FDA in the past year. Is that important? What's so important about that?

• 7:59Speaker 04

  It's hugely important. I mean, CRISPR is one of the most, I think, amazing medical technologies that we have right now. It is the ability to pinpoint certain genes and modify them while they're still in the body. So at the very tail end of last year, the first CRISPR-based therapies were approved by the FDA. This was a huge step in, in these therapies. So these were two different therapies that were both for sickle cell disease. So as I think a lot of people know, sickle cell disease is this condition where red blood cells are malformed. It can be incredibly debilitating. It affects about 100,000 Americans in the US, most of African descent. And again, it is a very debilitating...

• 8:40Speaker 04

  Condition and as I said, there were two gene therapies that both do pretty much the same thing and they are one time treatments, which is pretty incredible. The downside is that they're incredibly expensive. They're two to three million dollars per treatment, which is obviously way outside of the budgets of many people. But this approval is, you know, the first step to get more of these CRISPR based therapies approved for for a general public. And I think that's a that's a huge step.

• 9:11Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, that's good to hear. Let's let's stay on the health beat a little bit longer because I know that another story that you've been following is access to abortion care. It's been a really big story again this year. Remind us how access has changed across the country in in 2024.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  Right. It's hard to talk about medical news without talking about about abortion. So as I think we all know, in 2022, Roe versus Wade was struck down that eliminated the federal constitutional standard for abortion in the US. So this became a states issue and in many places it became kind of the Wild West in terms of care. And so there's been a lot of fallout in the last two years. OB GYNs that we've had on on Science Friday have said that they are moving out of states where abortion has been extremely limited or completely made illegal. One statistic that I always think about is earlier this year, we had a physician on from Idaho

• 10:10Speaker 04

  where there was a report that said in the last two years, almost a quarter of all OB GYNs had left the state.

• 10:16Ira Flatow?

  That was amazing. I remember that.

• 10:17Speaker 04

  They said they just couldn't ethically do their jobs. And I do think it's important when we talk about this issue that across the board, even, you know, across all political ideologies, support for abortion is actually pretty high. It stands at about 63%.

• 10:33Ira Flatow?

  We asked our listeners for some of their most memorable science news stories from the last year. Here's what LA from South Carolina sent us. For me, the biggest science breakthrough this year has to be the approval of weight loss injections by Medicare. I know these things have been around for a while, but when the purse string ...opened, my life changed. After six months, my health has shown considerable improvement, especially in those systems affected by diabetes. I was demoted to prediabetic from hardcore and at the age of 71, see more possibilities than I did at 61.

• 11:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think this has been one of the biggest science and health stories for a lot of people because it's so personal. These drugs that this listener was talking about include things like Ozempic, Wegovy, other, they're called GLP-1 agonist medications. And basically what they do is they trigger the release of insulin from the pancreas and this suppresses the appetite, it increases feelings of fullness, it slows digestion. These drugs are meant to treat conditions like type 2 diabetes, but they're also prescribed in some cases for weight loss.

• 11:41Ira Flatow?

  Right.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  And many people report that these have been incredibly successful for them personally.

• 11:47Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, I bet you there are people in our audience who take it or know somebody who has been taking these drugs.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 11:53Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, they're so, it's so widespread. Charles, let's move on to some exciting news from the fossil world. We always cover fossil stuff.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  We do. Yeah, I mean, people love fossils, right? But this is a fun one. Researchers exploring the, the Richards Spur Limestone Cave System. This is a paleontological hotbed in Oklahoma, found fossilized reptile skin. And what's cool here is it's estimated at 288 million years old, which is 130 million years older than the, the previous old skin record holder.

• 12:26Ira Flatow?

  Wow. That's a dubious, nice distinction. Yeah, absolutely.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  You gotta strive for something, right?

• 12:32Ira Flatow?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  So they think that because of this, the way the cave system is set up, it's got this really dry environment, it's got these clay sediments, and it's got this oil that sort of seeps through the sediments from even older critters that have broken down. And they think that that's what preserved this sample. They're not big, they're like fingernail size.

• 12:52Ira Flatow?

  The, the size of the fossils?

• 12:54Speaker 03

  The skin samples.

• 12:55Ira Flatow?

  The skin samples, yeah.

• 12:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. So they're like fingernail sized, but they say that they can see It's sort of crocodile-like. You've got these sort of disconnected scales that don't overlap. But they say that looking between the scales, they can see these sort of hinge-like structures that are like what you would see in a modern snake or a legless lizard. And the reason that this is sort of significant is that 288 million years ago, this is like, these are some of the first critters to live most of their lives under our land.

• 13:29Ira Flatow?

  Right.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  So you're sort of opening up the whole history of skin formation.

• 13:33Ira Flatow?

  And it's always really fascinating when you can actually have a sample of skin versus just the hard bone.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  Right, yeah. They've got both sort of the fossilized skin and also impressions of the skin in other things that give them information about what these critters might actually have looked like.

• 13:51Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, one of our favorite subjects on Science Friday, every time we can talk about it. And Kathleen, I remember one of your favorite stories to report from this year was about an animal closer to home than ancient lizards, ants.

• 14:04Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 14:05Ira Flatow?

  What could be so exciting about ants?

• 14:07Speaker 04

  Well, I'll tell you.

• 14:07Ira Flatow?

  Please.

• 14:08Speaker 04

  So, a little bit of context, back in 2011, scientists were doing a survey of ants in Manhattan, as you do if you are an ant scientist, I suppose.

• 14:19Ira Flatow?

  Sometimes you have no choice in the matter.

• 14:22Speaker 04

  Well, not a bad place to do ant research, I guess. And these entomologists found something really interesting. They found a new type of ant that they hadn't seen before in Manhattan. And this was an ant that was fairly large. And side note, the way that these entomologists do this research is, it's just the best. So they basically use a giant straw, they stick it into a flower bed in Times Square, for example.

• 14:49Ira Flatow?

  I know that flower bed.

• 14:50Speaker 04

  They suck up the ants and they go, not in the mouth, into a container. And then they can do their ant survey. So, not my job, but it's somebody's job. So, fast forward to this year, in 2024, this ant has dramatically established itself in Manhattan specifically, I'm not joking, off of Broadway.

• 15:12Ira Flatow?

  No comment necessary.

• 15:15Speaker 04

  It's been identified now as Laceus emarginatus, which is actually native to Europe. So, the big question now is, okay, how did these little ants not only get to New York, but really establish themselves?

• 15:28Ira Flatow?

  If you've been to Broadway, you know the answer to that.

• 15:30Speaker 04

  Well, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, is what they say. So, it's too early to know how this is going to affect the ant ecosystem in New York City, but obviously scientists are keeping an eye out for it.

• 15:44Ira Flatow?

  How do they survive? I mean, you know, we remember seeing those pictures of the rat carrying the piece of pizza.

• 15:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. I think urban animals are just very, just very scrappy. And I think those flower beds are pretty warm. But I have to say, the scientists want the public to help in identifying sightings of this ant, especially if you find it outside the city. iNaturalist has a specific page where you can do this, and I have to say, it's not called the Manhattan Project, it's called the Manhattan Ant Project.

• 16:14Ira Flatow?

  You outdad joked me today. And what does it look like again?

• 16:20Speaker 04

  It is a fairly large ant. It is dark brown with a reddish midsection, so you might need your special glasses for that one.

• 16:31Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, get your glasses to get out your... Yeah, I love looking for that.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Coming up after the break, one of our biggest science stories is about one of the smallest critters. Stick around for that.

• 16:47Ira Flatow?

  Hey there, folks. Ira here. I'm counting down the minutes of what has been another long year, and reminding you that this is your last chance to make a tax deductible donation for 2024. We still have that dollar-for-dollar donation match in effect, so take advantage and make your gift now. Don't wait, Science Friday is depending on you. Go to sciencefriday.com/support. Each one of you can make a difference in our work. From everyone at Science Friday, wishing you a happy and science-filled new year, and thanks.

• 17:22Speaker 05

  Science Friday is supported by PBS, presenting Going Wild. If you love learning about the natural world and meeting the scientists who help us understand it, be sure to check out the new season of Going Wild with Dr. Ray Wynn Grant. It's the chart-topping and Webby Award-winning podcast from the folks at Nature on PBS, now with a video companion series. In this season of Going Wild, host acclaimed wildlife ecologist Dr. Ray Wynn Grant heads out into the field to explore the animals, people, and stories that make nature worth saving. Stops include a hibernating black bear den in Arkansas and an underwater shipwreck site off the Florida coast. If you're looking for a place to start, check out the season's debut episode, where Ray joins beloved biologist and influencer Jordan King in the Florida Everglades to learn about

• 18:07Speaker 05

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• 18:21Speaker 06

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• 18:58Speaker 05

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• 19:33Speaker 07

  I'm Kevin Ruess. And I'm Casey Newton. And together, we've been tech journalists for decades. Now, we're your hosts of Machine Gods, a new podcast from NPR that makes sense of what AI means for your work, your life, and all of our futures. Twice a week, we'll be exploring the biggest moves in tech and give you unmatched access to the real titans of industry. Listen to Machine Gods from NPR on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 20:02Ira Flatow?

  Charles, let's close out with our final story for these Seers roundup. And it's an exciting one. And I'm talking about scientists announced this October that they completed the mapping of the entire brain of a fruit fly.

• 20:16Speaker 03

  Yes, I mean.

• 20:18Ira Flatow?

  This is important.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  This is very important. This is work looking at something called the connectome, which is basically mapping out the connections between everything in the brain. It's sort of like a wiring diagram for the brain, right? And you say, OK, fruit fly, how complicated can that be? But this is, they ended up mapping the connections between 140,000 different neurons in this teeny little brain, which, you know, connecting back and forth, that works out to like 50 million different linkages.

• 20:51Ira Flatow?

  Wow.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  So, you know, this is a huge project. To do this, they took 21 million scanning electron microscope images of fruit fly brains. They gave them to an AI that sort of puzzle pieced them together. But then they combined that data with volunteers who sort of traced the connections, the individual connections.

• 21:14Ira Flatow?

  One at a time.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, this is like years' worth of person power going into this. And this is sort of key to being able to start to link together which neuron does which behavior. If we're going to start with the fruit fly, eventually move to larger animals. But you, I mean, to your point. This was in 140,000 neurons. Estimates of human brains is 86 billion neurons.

• 21:44Ira Flatow?

  Wow.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  So they've got a ways to go.

• 21:46Ira Flatow?

  They've got a ways to go. Now, I want to thank you both for filling us in on some great science stories for 2024. Thank you very much. Charles Berkus, director and senior producer at Science Friday. Kathleen Davis, producer and fill-in host at Science Friday.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  That's all the time we have. Coming up tomorrow, we're resharing a conversation we had with science legend Dr. Jane Goodall more than 20 years ago. Lots of folks helped to make the show happen, including

• 22:14Speaker 04

  Diana Plasker. Beth Ramey. Danielle Johnson.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Rasha Reddy. I'm John Dankosky. We'll see you tomorrow.