Pod Insights Science Friday Possible Signature Of Life Detected On Exoplanet—Maybe | A Colossal Squid Video About this episode The Webb Space Telescope picked up traces of dimethyl sulfide on planet K2-18b. On Earth, the molecule comes from microbes and phytoplankton. Also, researchers captured the first confirmed video of a colossal squid swimming in its natural habitat—almost 2,000 feet deep.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:20 Flora Lichtman? This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichtman. Major galactic news this week. Scientists may have detected possible signs of life on a planet right here in our galaxy. Is this one of the best hints we've gotten that alien life exists? We're going to talk about it. Here to discuss this and other science news of the week is Anil Oza, science reporter at STAT and MIT, based in Boston, Massachusetts. Anil, welcome back.
1:46 Speaker 03 Hello, hello. No better way to spend a Friday.
1:48 Flora Lichtman? Agree. So this space news seems exciting. Why do scientists think they've found signs of life?
1:55 Speaker 03 Yeah, some astronomers are pretty excited that they've detected traces of dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide on a planet that's light years and light years away. And it's really exciting because here on Earth, that chemical can only be created by a living organism. So this may be a hint that there is life on this planet.
2:14 Flora Lichtman? How did they figure this out?
2:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, so they use data from the James Webb Space Telescope, which was launched just a couple of years ago. And that can be really far into the galaxy. And using data from the light of different planets and stars, it can analyze that to know what chemicals are present there. And in the past, they've seen some carbon-based chemical signatures and other things that could imply life. But this one is really exciting because as far as we know, this can only be generated by living organisms.
2:41 Flora Lichtman? The DMS and DMDS.
2:43 Speaker 03 That's right, yeah. But they didn't want to jump to conclusions too fast. It's a hint that there is life, but they're not 100% saying that there is life on this planet.
2:52 Flora Lichtman? Yeah, I mean, we hear stories like this all the time. And I was going to ask, like, where is this on the continuum of, yes, intriguing lead, among other intriguing leads, to aliens exist?
3:03 Speaker 03 Yeah, scientists are saying this is the strongest sign yet that we've seen life on other planets. But there's also a little bit of the astronomer pride wolf situation going on, where they thought they detected this chemical a couple of years ago. And one scientist, other scientists, started re-analyzing their data. It didn't really hold up. So there's the first question of, is this study correct? Are they correctly identifying that there's dimethyl sulfide? But then also, there's a question of maybe there are other ways to generate this chemical that we just don't know about here on Earth.
3:33 Flora Lichtman? And I guess this, this planet is 124 layers away. So we're not going to like zip over and scoop up some of this ocean anytime soon.
3:42 Speaker 03 No, we're not getting any visits from them anytime soon.
3:45 Flora Lichtman? Okay. In, in other news, and I know you've reported on this, the Trump administration is continuing to cut and propose big cuts to science. And one target has been indirect costs. Can you walk us through what indirect costs are?
4:00 Speaker 03 Yeah, this may be the most important thing in research that you have probably never heard of. So when scientists apply for grants, say, from the federal government, they apply for a certain amount of money to do the work that they need to do. But on top of that, the government in this case will pay a percent to the institution that a researcher is at to cover what are known as indirect costs. So these are things that are difficult to itemize on any one research grant. So space in a building, like a lab, electricity, plumbing, shared staff. And these rates vary widely from university to university. So if you have really complicated equipment, like- Particle accelerators, fancy MRI machines, these can be really high.
4:40 Speaker 03 And since Trump has come into office, he and his administration have proposed slashing these. So they would want a blanket rate at all of the universities, which if implemented, could be existential for the way that we think about research here in the US.
4:54 Flora Lichtman? What's the blanket rate that they want?
4:56 Speaker 03 They want to be 15% of a grant, which is much lower. The average right now at universities is 25%. But at these research-heavy institutions, it can be anywhere from like 50, 60, even sometimes 70%. So this would be a massive, massive cut.
5:11 Flora Lichtman? So I mean, 15% can be standard for indirect cost budgeting in other industries. Why is it different in science? Like, why can it go as high as 70%?
5:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, so the science that we're doing now increasingly requires really fancy, complicated equipment. And so to do this work, you need really high indirect cost rates. And so this is where people are saying that if we do have a flat rate, we need other things to sort of step in. We either need grants to supplement these indirect costs to buy this big equipment, to give block grants maybe to universities to pay for buildings, particularly if they're in really expensive cities, those could really add up.
5:51 Flora Lichtman? Why is the administration targeting indirect costs? What's the argument?
5:54 Speaker 03 Their argument is that this money is not doing as much work as it should. So they have argued that they want to transition money from indirect costs to direct costs. So that would be moving this money from paying for things like buildings to actually funding researchers' salaries, chemical reagents, things that are used in experiments. But I think this is somewhat a misconception of what indirect costs are. They're not just a tip that you're adding on top of a grant. These costs are built into needing to do this research. Like, you need allowances to do an experiment. You need electricity and plumbing. And so that's the argument, but researchers really push back on that.
6:31 Flora Lichtman? What are the potential impacts if this goes through?
6:33 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's tough to say. So this is right now locked up in the courts and it's being paused. It wasn't deemed lawful. So we'll have to see how that plays out. But if this does go through, I think we will see a completely different research infrastructure. Since World War II, universities have really relied on the federal government to supplement their research infrastructure. And if the government is no longer willing to do that, it could really reshape the way that we think about science in the US.
7:01 Flora Lichtman? So Harvard has been in the headlines this week, too. What's happening there that's impacting research?
7:07 Speaker 03 That's right. So they made news because the Trump administration sent a list of demands to Harvard last Friday in response to this antisemitism task force that they have assembled in the federal government. And they were asking Harvard to make sweeping policy changes and notably to allow for federal oversight on the university and the classes it teaches, the people they hire and things like that.
7:28 Flora Lichtman? And what happened?
7:29 Speaker 03 Yeah, so this is a similar demand that they gave to Columbia University. And Columbia submitted to the Trump administration, or they are going to do much of what they asked for. Harvard decided to say no, which initially I think garnered a lot of praise from researchers and people on looking. But people at the university sort of took this with some pride, but a lot of unease because they assume, and rightfully so, that it would lead to more grants being terminated and the Trump administration using the tools that it has to target Harvard.
8:03 Flora Lichtman? Just to step back a little bit, I mean, you've been reporting on these cuts to science. How are the researchers that you're talking to, how are they feeling?
8:11 Speaker 03 I mean, they're gutted. This is unprecedented, which feels like a word we're saying all the time now. But in the past, having a grant terminated was such an abnormal thing. You would need to do really egregious research fraud. You would really need to be doing something wrong to have grants terminated. So researchers aren't used to this, whereas researchers now all the time are getting grants terminated. But there isn't a process to know what to do here. It's, and so they're just sort of foundering and not really knowing what to do.
8:39 Flora Lichtman? Well, speaking of basic research and why we still might want to do it, let's move on to this really cool brain science story this week. Scientists created the largest map yet of a brain. Tell us about it.
8:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, so this is the most detailed brain map that we have. It's just the size of a poppy seed from the brain of a mouse. It's about one cubic millimeter, but inside that millimeter is 200,000 brain cells, 500 million connections between these cells and almost four kilometers of neuronal wiring.
9:13 Flora Lichtman? So this is a piece of a mouse brain?
9:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, this is just like a tiny slice of it.
9:18 Flora Lichtman? How did they build it?
9:19 Speaker 03 So they took a part of the mouse brain and they basically dissected it into really tiny, tiny parts. And then they could reverse engineer by taking these pictures and sort of putting them together in a 3D model.
9:29 Flora Lichtman? Did this study include mice watching The Matrix? Or am I making that up?
9:33 Speaker 03 Oh, they absolutely did. So they took parts of the mouse's visual cortex. And for that to matter, they need to be watching something. And so these researchers chose to let them watch The Matrix for whatever reason.
9:46 Flora Lichtman? Preference, sounds like.
9:47 Speaker 03 Right, yeah.
9:48 Flora Lichtman? Okay, so what do you do with this, this map? How is it useful?
9:52 Speaker 03 So there's a lot of fundamental questions that we can answer about the brain and how these cells decide to wire up based on these maps. But obviously, the end goal is getting a map of the human brain. But the human brain is so large, so complicated, that we need to sort of inch our way up there. So we've taken brain maps of really small insects. We've now mapped the brain of a fruit fly. And so the mouse is like that next step to the human brain eventually.
10:19 Flora Lichtman? While we're on brains, there's a story this week about a salmon brain on drugs, specifically Benzos. Give us the details.
10:26 Speaker 03 Yeah, the salmon may be having a better time than we are. So researchers in the past have found that there are about 900 different drugs in the runoff of our streams and rivers. And some of those include antibiotics, but also antidepressant medications. So this group of researchers set out to figure out what exactly that's doing to them.
10:47 Flora Lichtman? So how did they do the study and what did they find?
10:49 Speaker 03 Yeah, so they took a handful of fish and they gave them clozapam and tramadol, which is an anxiety med and a pain med. And then sort of set them off on their way to migrate from the river to the ocean. And they found that they were really successful in doing so.
11:06 Flora Lichtman? What do you mean?
11:08 Speaker 03 So when fish are migrating, they may encounter dams which have these really fast going fans. And so the fish need to figure out how exactly to navigate that. And typically fish will sort of just wait and assess what's going on with this fan and how to do it safely. But these fish on benzos would just sort of go straight through it, not even thinking twice about it, which made them migrate a lot faster than the other fish that were not on drugs.
11:32 Flora Lichtman? So less anxiety about clearing the dam.
11:36 Speaker 03 Absolutely, but it may not be all good. When they get to the ocean, we don't know how successful they are. So they may get eaten because they're not anxious enough for predators and things like that.
11:46 Flora Lichtman? I can't imagine this is a good news story, even if they're successfully navigating the dams.
11:52 Speaker 03 No, but we need to take what little good news we can have right now.
11:56 Flora Lichtman? Tax season mercifully is over. That's some good news as of this week, but apparently the history of tax evasion goes back a long time.
12:05 Speaker 03 Yeah, it goes back almost 1900 years ago, according to a new study that the New York Times reported on, where someone 1900 years ago falsified documents on papyrus so they wouldn't have to pay as many taxes as they should have.
12:19 Flora Lichtman? What happened to the tax evader?
12:21 Speaker 03 So the records on that are not entirely clear. But based on what we know about law from back then, if he was caught, he was probably either beheaded or had his face eaten by leopards.
12:32 Flora Lichtman? Oh, boy, eaten by leopards. Okay, well, that seems like the perfect place to end it. Anil, thanks for joining me.
12:37 Speaker 03 Of course. Thank you so much, Flora.
12:39 Flora Lichtman? Anil Oza is a reporter for STAT and MIT, based in Boston, Massachusetts.
12:47 Flora Lichtman? After the break, an historic cephalopod sighting, the first confirmed video of a colossal squid cruising around in its natural habitat.
12:57 Speaker 04 They're a great example of some of the beauty of deep sea animals that we don't get to see when dead specimens are what we have to examine. So for me, I was over the moon for a number of different reasons.
13:09 Flora Lichtman? We're going to dive in after the break.
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15:42 Flora Lichtman? If you know one thing about this program, you know that we love a good cephalopod. So when we got word this week that scientists had recorded the first ever confirmed footage of a live colossal squid in its deep sea environment, swimming around in the South Atlantic Ocean, near the South Sandwich Islands, we knew we had to dive in. Joining me now to talk about the sighting is Dr. Kat Bolstad. She's one of the squid experts the researchers sent their videos to for identification, and she's an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. Kat, welcome to Science Friday.
16:22 Speaker 04 Thank you so much for having me. Glad to hear you love a good cephalopod. I do, too.
16:26 Flora Lichtman? Where is this found? Who found this?
16:29 Speaker 04 This footage was collected by Schmidt Ocean Institute on their new vessel, Falcon 2, and they were on a partnership voyage with Ocean Census, using their remotely operated vehicle, Sebastian, to search for new species and habitats in the deep sea around the South Sandwich Islands.
16:46 Flora Lichtman? OK, so this is a species that we really mostly know from dead specimens. We've never seen one alive in its natural habitat. It was cool for me. What was it like for you as a squid expert to see this?
16:58 Speaker 04 It was thrilling for me on a couple of levels. So the glass squids are some of my very favorite squids, just because of how spectacular they look. They have these transparent bodies. They look like little glass sculptures, which is where the common name comes from. And seeing a glass squid is always a fantastic experience because of how beautiful they are. On another level, I love that this is the first glimpse that the world is going to get of the mighty colossal squid. If and when we see an adult, there will be some of that monster hype, some of that stuff of nightmares, some of that, you know, kraken from the deep sea. That is not going to be involved in this particular footage.
17:39 Speaker 04 And they're a great example of some of the beauty of deep sea animals that we don't get to see when dead specimens are what we have to examine. So for me, I was over the moon and for a number of different reasons.
17:52 Flora Lichtman? The colossal squid is not the same as the giant squid.
17:56 Speaker 04 Correct. The colossal squid and the giant squid are two completely different animals from completely different families. The giant squid is found in temperate oceans, colossals in the Antarctic, and healthy giant squid will never be seen near the surface. And that's partly because there is a big temperature gradient that would cause them to go through temperature shock on the way up. Now, in the Antarctic, because the water temperature is between 2 degrees Celsius and minus 2 degrees Celsius right throughout the water column, that temperature barrier doesn't exist. So although the colossal squid probably lives in the deep sea pretty much all the time, it is possible on occasion for it to come to the surface. And so when these large individuals have come up next to fishing vessels, sometimes they're entangled in the lines and these large specimens get collected and brought
18:40 Speaker 04 back for science because it's clear that they won't survive once released. And, you know, they're large, they're deflated, they're missing some of their skin, they're a very impressive animal. We are quite certain that when we see one alive, it will be much more magnificent than it is, you know, laid out on a table in the lab. But I actually love that our first sighting of this animal alive that we're able to confirm is a small one.
19:07 Flora Lichtman? A baby?
19:08 Speaker 04 It's a young individual. It's not quite a baby, so babies have some different features that have been lost by this stage, but quite a small one.
19:18 Flora Lichtman? Listeners, you can see a video of this juvenile colossal squid on our website at sciencefriday.com/colossal. Okay, so when did you first hear about it? Where were you? Was there a moment where you first heard about it?
19:33 Speaker 04 There was a moment, it was a very specific moment. So a friend and I have been working on actually building a deep sea camera system with the intent of being better at filming large deep sea squids, which are famously wary of disturbance in their environment, they've got great vision, they probably know that we are there with our light noisy technology a long time before we know they are there, so we must be missing... Many, many opportunities to see these animals just by being scary with the gear we put in the water. So my friend Tom Linley from the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, who is a deep sea fish expert. We put our heads together. He has built deep sea camera
20:16 Speaker 04 stuff before, and we came up with an idea to build a camera system that is not only stealthy and so hopefully not offensive, but actually interesting maybe to a large colossal squid, so that it might even come to look at the camera and not make us have to find it in the vast expanse of the deep sea. And we had just been on a voyage down the Antarctic Peninsula, putting this camera system in the water. And the day that we got back on shore, having not yet filmed the adult colossal squid, we were alerted to the fact that this little clip had been opportunistically collected by Schmidt the day before. So we got off the ship, we had packed up all our gear, we had said goodbye to everybody, we went
20:56 Speaker 04 and checked into a weird Airbnb in southern Argentina, and then we got this footage. And it was not instantaneously able to be confirmed that it was a colossal squid, but it was it was very likely already. And the more I looked at it, the more certain I was. And then we got the high res version and I could see the key features. And I was like, yeah, they've they've got it. Which were? What are the key features? So what we're looking for is a combination of hooks and suckers on the squid's arms and tentacles. So very quick clarification, squid have eight shorter arms that have suckers and or hooks all the way along their length, and two longer tentacles where those structures are grouped at the ends. That's the difference. Octopuses never have tentacles, by the way.
21:41 Speaker 04 So on a colossal squid, there are hooks at the ends of the tentacles, which were clearly visible in the footage. And what we were looking for is also hooks in the middle of the arms, because the colossal squid is the only squid that we know of that has suckers near the beak, then hooks midway along the arm, and then suckers again toward the arm tips. And once we confirmed that those hooks were present midway along the arms, we knew it could only be colossal squid. Elbow hooks and suckers. Sure, elbow hooks. Why not? There now there now there is a squid called the elbow squid, though. Magna pina, the big fin squid. And if you look up footage of of Magna pina or big fin, you will see what I mean by elbow squid. And that's a whole other story.
22:20 Flora Lichtman? How big was this juvenile squid that was caught on camera? And how colossal do they get?
22:27 Speaker 04 So this animal was probably, we estimate about 30 centimeters or just under a foot long. And they can grow, we think, to lengths of probably seven meters or about 20 feet. But we know that they can get larger than the ones that we've seen so far because beaks from larger individuals have been found in the stomachs of sperm whales. And so that sperm whales actually are one of our best sources of information for colossal squid because it makes up the vast majority of the sperm whales diet in the Antarctic.
23:00 Flora Lichtman? Really?
23:00 Speaker 04 Yes, by by volume and by weight. The vast majority of sperm whale diet in the Antarctic is colossal squid.
23:08 Flora Lichtman? Okay. You mentioned these are different from giant squid. They live in different areas, different species. Which one is cooler?
23:16 Speaker 04 What a question.
23:21 Speaker 04 All right.
23:24 Speaker 04 Am I going to commit? Am I going to commit to which one is cooler?
23:27 Flora Lichtman? I get you're really hesitating here.
23:29 Speaker 04 Well, I will say that the colossal squid has more interesting features than the giant squid. The giant squid is very cool for a lot of reasons. It is the longest squid. It gets up to 13 meters or nearly 40 feet. Weighs less than the colossal squid though, so it's a very long, skinny one. But apart from that, it doesn't have the hooks. It's probably not that active an animal. It is incredibly beautiful in life, though. The first footage of the giant squid was very surprising because it's this beautiful golden silvery iridescent color that again, looks nothing like the deflated trawled specimens that we would see in the lab.
24:10 Speaker 04 The colossal squid is intriguing because it is quite an unusual member of the family that it lives in, partly in that it grows so large and partly for some other features. It has these enormous eyes. It has light organs. It has these hooks that swivel 360 degrees on the ends of the tentacles. So, you know, in terms of talking points and interesting features, I will go with colossal squid, although I have a lot of love for the giant squid as well.
24:39 Flora Lichtman? What do you really want to know about these animals?
24:43 Speaker 04 Well, there are a lot of things that we only hypothesize or we're beginning to think we might know. We actually don't know very much about what they eat themselves. We know some of their predators, but we don't know what role they are playing in the food chain as predators themselves. Apart from observations of them attacking hook-toothed fish, they very rarely have anything in their stomachs. So when we analyze the stomach contents, we don't see very much. We don't actually know the lifespan. So someone last year published a study looking at growth rings in the beak and estimated their maximum lifespan might be about 5.2 years, which is quite long for a cephalopod, but would be a very fast growth rate for an animal this size.
25:29 Speaker 04 It is certainly possible. The issue is that for a lot of deep-sea squid, the rate at which these growth rings are laid down hasn't been confirmed. So we are hypothesizing that it's on a daily basis, but it may not be. And if it isn't, then the interpretation of those growth rings changes quite a lot. And the other thing I will say is all of the large specimens we've seen so far have been female. And admittedly, that's not that many specimens, but we don't really know what the males will look like. We don't know if they reach similar sizes to the females. In some squid species, they do, and some they don't. Do they have exactly the same light organs and armature? Or are they different in some way? So that's also something that would be great to know more about.
26:13 Flora Lichtman? You know, it's to me, one thing that's just amazing about the story is we've only had really glimpses of this squid. It's so huge. It just seems amazing that there are still animals, especially animals this big, that we've really never seen in the wild, you know, seen alive in their habitat. What do you make of that?
26:36 Speaker 04 Well, one of the things I love about the colossal squid is the fact that it is an enormous wild animal that never in its entire natural lifespan will encounter humans and just has no idea that humans even exist. So that's just a great reminder for us that we're not the center of everything for everything on the planet, although we have an outsized impact on the environment, of course. But just to remember that there are huge things out there that, you know, just have no concept of us at all.
27:06 Flora Lichtman? I love that as an ending thought. I'd like to think of us less, too.
27:11 Speaker 04 Wouldn't we all? Yeah. If I could spend all my time thinking about squid and not thinking about people, that would be great.
27:17 Flora Lichtman? That's Dr. Kat Bolstad, an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. Thanks for talking with me today.
27:27 Speaker 04 Thanks, Laura.
27:28 Flora Lichtman? You can see a video of this juvenile colossal squid on our website at sciencefriday.com/colossal.
27:39 Flora Lichtman? And that is about all we have time for. Lots of folks helped make this show happen, including...
27:44 Speaker 06 Shishana Buxbaum. Beth Ramey. Danielle Johnson. Jackie Hirschfeld.
27:50 Flora Lichtman? I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.
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