EPA Seeks To Revoke Scientific Basis For Greenhouse Gas Rules

The “endangerment finding” is the basis for regulations on emissions from cars, power plants, and more. Plus, a robot performs surgery.

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.

• 0:16Speaker 01

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• 0:34Ira Flatow?

  This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. This week, the Trump administration indicated that they'll seek to roll back a key EPA finding that allows the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from things like cars and power plants. Here with the details and other stories from the Week in Science is Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at News Scientist in New York. Welcome back, Sophie.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:01Ira Flatow?

  You're welcome. Okay, what is this rule? How does it interact with how the EPA regulates things?

• 1:07Speaker 02

  Well, the finding itself, it's called the Endangerment Finding, is basically the basis of the EPA regulating power plants and vehicles. Like you said, without it, there would be a major deregulatory effort. Our reporter, James DeNeen, spoke with a lot of climate scientists who described this report in less-than-glowing terms. They described it as flimsy. Someone called it nutty. One researcher, whose work was cited in the report, has called it a farce. And so, there is overwhelming scientific evidence that supports the Endangerment Finding, and already, the EPA is going to face a lot of pushback legally, and they're open to public comment as well if they want to try to move forward with this.

• 1:51Ira Flatow?

  What exactly is the aim here? To take away all the basis for regulation?

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Yes, the claim is that it's bad for the economy to limit the emissions that power plants and vehicles are allowed to do, and that by repealing the endangerment finding and removing those regulations, it would be stimulating to the economy.

• 2:11Ira Flatow?

  Wow, we seem like we're turning the clock back.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  It does seem like an attempt to do that, yes.

• 2:17Ira Flatow?

  So is this a done deal, or is this just a possible outcome?

• 2:22Speaker 02

  This is just a possible outcome, and already there is organizations lining up lawsuits to try to prevent this. The EPA is opening a public comment period, so people will be able to comment on this and to voice their disagreement if that's what they choose to do.

• 2:38Ira Flatow?

  Right.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  So this isn't, this is just the beginning of a process.

• 2:42Ira Flatow?

  All right, let's switch gears to another kind of emission. Tell us about the news this week. Read the search for life outside of solar system and an exoplanet.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  That's right. So earlier this year, the exoplanet K218B became one of the leading candidates for life because researchers were able to detect what they said was a signature of these molecules, dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide. And these two molecules on Earth are only produced by life. So that would really suggest some exciting news. The problem is, when you're talking about something as far away as this planet, it's 124 light years away. And the way that we figure out what's in the atmosphere is basically researchers look at the light from the star that this planet relies on, and as that light passes through the planet's atmosphere, it can tell us what molecules are there. But

• 3:34Speaker 02

  you have to do some statistical analysis. There's different ways of interpreting the data, and so that's made this a controversial finding. So first, there was pushback from other researchers who reassessed the data and found no evidence. Then the original researchers looked at the data again and did their own reanalysis and said it supported their finding. And now researchers have looked at new data, and one of the researchers on the original study says this supports the finding, but other researchers said it shows this isn't a sign of life at all.

• 4:06Ira Flatow?

  Wow, controversy in science, scientists disagree with one another? Wow.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Wild, right?

• 4:12Ira Flatow?

  Wow, wild. Let's, let's get back here on Earth for a bit. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine stretches on and there's unfortunately an innovation in warfare technology. Tell us about that.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Well, from the beginning of this conflict, cheap, small drones have played a role. And recently, people have spotted these drones that are equipped with solar panels. So they don't come with solar panels, they've been fitted with them. And the idea is that this could keep a drone charged and allow it to lay in wait to ambush someone. So almost like the drone has become a new kind of landmine. It can just lurk indefinitely until a target comes near.

• 4:53Ira Flatow?

  Is this a Ukrainian or a Russian drone?

• 4:56Speaker 02

  This seems to be coming from Russian forces. But the fact is that if Russian forces are able to modify drones in this way, Ukrainian forces could do the same thing. And so this is, this might become a much more widespread thing.

• 5:09Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, because the Ukrainians are pretty good at drones, aren't they?

• 5:12Speaker 02

  That's right. One of the really interesting things about this conflict is the use of tools like hobbyist drones that maybe weren't intended for warfare originally. But people are innovating and turning them into military tools. I mean, whether we think that's a good thing or a bad thing, it depends on your perspective. But this adding solar panels to it is now the latest twist in the saga.

• 5:37Ira Flatow?

  So it can lurk around for as long as the solar panels?

• 5:40Speaker 02

  That's right. It seems to be, the panels right now that they're using are a little heavy. And again, these drones weren't designed with those, that type of modification in mind. So that might limit the amount of power it's allowed to get out of it. It might be something like the power wouldn't be used to keep the drone flying, but it could allow the drone's sensors to recharge. So if the drone parks itself in some location and then it uses these chargers to keep its sensors alive, it could just not move and keep a, a digital eye out for anyone coming near. And then once it senses a target, that's when it kicks into gear and flies there to attack.

• 6:19Ira Flatow?

  There's another tech that's a bit more hopeful and, and we're talking here about batteries based on rust. Wow, they should see my old car. They could, they could.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  I think this is such a cool idea. And I mean, this is based on the idea that when you've got renewable power, it ebbs and flows, you know, solar panels are great when the sun's shining, but you need some sort of battery to store that power for the times when the energy is not so abundant. And so a lot of times that means plugging a battery into the grid that is manufactured in China, made out of lithium iron phosphate. And the problem is those batteries, they don't hold charge for as long as you would like, just about four to six hours, and they can be quite expensive. So now researchers have developed a battery made from some of the cheapest materials you can find, air and iron, and these can, the claim is that these can hold their charge for 100 hours or longer.

• 7:12Ira Flatow?

  Sophie, I find this rust battery thing something I have to know more about. Give me some more details on this.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Right. So the way this works is it charges by, it takes electricity, you feed it into the system, and it uses that to convert iron oxides into, iron oxides are a form of rust, and it transforms this rust back into iron. And then when it's time for the battery to discharge, it can release this energy by reacting with oxygen in the air to turn back into rust.

• 7:45Ira Flatow?

  Wow. And so this is like, because rust is everywhere, this is really cheap, right?

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 7:50Ira Flatow?

  You don't need special minerals, hard to dig up out of the ground to do this.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Exactly. That's one of the really cool things about this. It's just taking iron, turning it into rust, and then turning it back into iron. And that's how the battery works, which means what you need is air, which we have a lot of, and iron, which is pretty easy for most places to source.

• 8:08Ira Flatow?

  Wow. Let's move on from rust to diamonds. I already think of diamonds as super strong, right, the strongest materials on earth, but there's now a new champion, a new stronger diamond in town?

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Yes, diamonds can be made even stronger by growing them in a hexagonal shape. So the way that diamonds are is they are molecules ordered in a cubic crystalline structure. And researchers have have seen hints that you could have hexagonal diamond, but it's only been found in in small amounts, and that's in when it's mixed in with cubic diamonds. And researchers have tried to grow it before, but until now they haven't succeeded. And now they've grown a relatively large sample of hexagonal diamond, and it's mostly 100% hexagonal without any cubic diamond mixed in.

• 8:57Ira Flatow?

  Wow, wow, I'm not getting that anytime soon in my jewelry store, I don't think.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Maybe not. It's it's still gonna take some work to grow it in larger amounts. So far, they've grown a piece that's about 1 millimeter wide, so very, very small. But if they could scale this up, the the hexagonal diamond is about 60% harder than your regular diamond.

• 9:18Ira Flatow?

  Really?

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Which means it could be used for things like drilling and making much more resilient tools.

• 9:24Ira Flatow?

  Love it. All right, you know, I love weird quantum stuff. And you have a story about how quantum entanglement might not just be a one-time thing? Tell me about that.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  This is super cool. So when two particles are quantum entangled, it means they're linked together in such a way that they can do things like spooky action at a distance. They have they have all these weird shared behaviors. And you're used to thinking about quantum entanglement like a link, but what if you could think about it as a bank, something you could tap into? Researchers found out that if you have a pair of hypothetical experimenters and they've got these entangled particles, they can share that entanglement with another pair of experimenters. And then it can be shared again and again. In fact, they can keep on doing this indefinitely, as if our little bank of entanglement is an almost infinite one.

• 10:15Ira Flatow?

  Wow, why would they want to do that? Why do we care?

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Well, if you want to have something entangled, which is entanglement is required for things like quantum computing or quantum communication, you can create entanglement from scratch. But the idea is sharing it might be an easier way to to get more entanglement out there.

• 10:35Ira Flatow?

  Sure, I get that. I get. Finally, something sweet to end on. A super old sample of honey. Really?

• 10:43Speaker 02

  That's right. So near Pompeii, there are these, there's this ancient shrine and in in it, researchers in, you know, 1954, they found these pots with a sticky residue. And they thought at the time that it was animal or vegetable fat. But they noticed it was contaminated with pollen and insect parts. And then now researchers have used more advanced techniques to analyze the residue of this substance. You know, they've used things like gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. And they found a lot of sugars and some complex acids and some proteins that are found in royal jelly.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  They even found some protein fragments from a mite that we know feeds on honeybees. So we're pretty sure that this pot used to hold ancient honey.

• 11:36Ira Flatow?

  Anybody stick their finger and taste it to see?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, these were corked and the seals have since degraded. And so I don't think you would really enjoy tasting whatever is left of this honey. You know, bacteria has gotten into it. It's not, it's not going to be a yummy taste, but we know it once was. Maybe Winnie the Pooh can try it.

• 11:57Ira Flatow?

  All right, Sophie. Always great to have you come and talk with us. Thanks for taking down to be with us today.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 12:03Ira Flatow?

  Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Scientist here in New York.

• 12:12Ira Flatow?

  We have to take a break, and when we come back, scientists have successfully trained a robot to perform surgery without the help of a surgeon.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  We didn't expect that we would get to a point where we didn't need any human intervention. So this was really, you know, even better than we anticipated.

• 12:33Flora Lichtman?

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• 13:17Flora Lichtman?

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• 16:10Ira Flatow?

  If you've had surgery recently, your surgeon might have been a robot. Yeah, almost a quarter of all surgeries in the US use robots. But don't be alarmed, because every one of the robot's movements in the operating room is actually controlled by a surgeon. But there is change in the wind, because for the first time, researchers at Johns Hopkins University have trained a robot to do surgery on its own. A portion of a gallbladder surgery on a test pig cadaver. The encouraging results were published last month in the journal Science Robotics. Joining me now to dissect how he trained the robot to accomplish this feat and what

• 16:53Ira Flatow?

  it means for the future of robotic surgery is my guest, Dr. Axel Krieger, Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, based in Baltimore, Maryland. Welcome to Science Friday.

• 17:06Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 17:08Ira Flatow?

  You're quite welcome. Can you walk me through what part of the surgery the robot was able to perform all by itself?

• 17:16Speaker 03

  Yes, there are about three large portions of gallbladder surgery. The first one is dissecting the gallbladder from the liver bed. The second part, that's what we really focused on, is the precision clipping and cutting of the artery and the bile duct. So this is going in with small little clippers and identifying where the artery is, placing three plastic clips in it, and then identifying where the bile duct is, then placing three plastic clips in that, and then dissecting between the clips so that the gallbladder then in the third procedural step can be effectively removed. And so that's a very complex, lengthy step, and really requires a lot of precision.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  And there's a lot of deformation of the tissue and anatomical variations even between healthy pigs.

• 18:08Ira Flatow?

  Right. So how do you train a robot to do this?

• 18:11Speaker 03

  We used a technique called imitation learning. We can effectively now watch expert surgeons perform these steps and then repeat these steps over and over, and then train a network to learn to then reproduce those steps. So we can tie what the robot sees to what the robot should do. So it's a hierarchical framework that first predicts the right phase of the surgery and then predicts what the robot should do, given the certain video image that the robot sees currently.

• 18:42Ira Flatow?

  What happens if the robot makes a mistake? I mean, is it able to correct itself before it does something really bad?

• 18:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, the really nice thing that we demonstrated in our study is that our robot is capable to adapt to small little misplacements. So imagine if the clipper doesn't catch the artery perfectly on the first try, the system automatically recognizes that and then self-corrects. That's one way. So self-correction by the robotic systems. And then also the surgeon would then be the supervisor and could always stop and take over and complete the procedure manual if necessary. In our study, in eight consecutive PIC surgeries, we didn't need any interventions, but if something unforeseen happens, the surgeon can always intervene and take over.

• 19:31Ira Flatow?

  Right. Were you surprised yourself just how well the robot performed here?

• 19:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, super exciting result. When we set out on this project, we didn't expect that we would get to a point where we didn't need any human intervention. So this was really even better than we anticipated.

• 19:48Ira Flatow?

  Let's talk about getting to that point. How do you get to that point? How big a jump in technology is this new robot from other older ones?

• 19:57Speaker 03

  It's a major step forward. In older systems, we were able to automate maybe one small task, one little step, and now tying these steps effectively together and recognizing small mistakes and then consecutively performing these substeps to do like a big chunk of a surgical procedure. That's a huge step forward.

• 20:19Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, because you've been designing robots to do this itself for a few years now, right?

• 20:25Speaker 03

  Absolutely. We published a study in 2022 where we did a step called the anastomosis. So that's suturing of tubular structures. And so we were able to form that suturing step. But what's really exciting now is that we can boost up the success rate and we have this framework that is more general. So we can train it for all different kinds of procedures, not just one step, but by adding more data, we can just learn more procedures and really get closer to clinical viability of this technology.

• 21:00Ira Flatow?

  You know, I watched the video you put online of the robot actually doing this work. And I was surprised how well it did it. I mean, how does the robot's work compare to a human surgeon?

• 21:14Speaker 03

  In our study, we really wanted to demonstrate the feasibility of this technology. So we didn't do a very thorough evaluation comparing to expert surgeons. We did a small little comparison to one surgeon and showed that our robot is a bit slower. We ran it quite slow so we can intervene if something happens. But the movement was more smooth compared to the expert surgeon. So really some early indication that we are getting on par with even an expert surgeon there.

• 21:43Ira Flatow?

  And what about other kinds of surgeries? Now that you've had success with this, do you see you're able to expand to others besides just gallbladder surgery?

• 21:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, for us, this is a fantastic starting point. Gallbladder surgery was the first surgery that was performed minimally invasively. So has this lighthouse character of a new technique for surgery. So that's why it's such a good target. But we are excited to use this technology now for other applications, for other surgeries. You know, a big one that we are working on right now is precision tumor resection, where it's so difficult to delineate where the tumor is from the healthy tissue and cutting that out precisely. That is so difficult for surgeons. And we'd really wanna use this technology to improve surgical techniques.

• 22:28Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask you about the benefit of a robot that can do surgery without human intervention. But you're saying here that in some cases it can do it better than the surgeon.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what we are working on. So integrating preoperative scans effectively. So seeing where the tumor is on other imaging and then combining it effectively with surgical videos. That's kind of the next big goal that we are working on. And that is very hard for human surgeons to map these things together in the head. And so doing this with a robot, we might be able to even boost expert surgical performance.

• 23:04Ira Flatow?

  Are you saying a robot independent of a surgeon guiding it or with surgeon supervision?

• 23:09Speaker 03

  Always surgeon supervision. Our goal is not to replace surgeons. We want to just make the surgery easier and help surgeons work with this rising caseload, right? We have an aging society, more surgeries needed. And so the, you know, individual caseload is doubling in the next 10 years. So how can we, you know, help surgeons with that? How can we do an effective surgery later in the day when the surgeon might get tired by helping the surgeon not having to do every part and every little step of every surgery, but then for portions of it, just watch the robot do it and then intervene if necessary. That can really improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of surgeries.

• 23:51Ira Flatow?

  A lot of surgeries are done today through lap surgery, laparoscopy, right? Can the robot do that also?

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So the big improvement of using surgical robots is making it easier to do laparoscopic surgery, minimally invasive surgery. So traditionally surgeons had to perform large incisions and work with the organs directly with their hands, guidance directly with their eyes. Now we use cameras and small ports and we use surgical tools in ports. And the surgical robot that we are working with is a minimally invasive keyhole surgery robot. And so we can do this procedure minimally invasively, yes.

• 24:33Ira Flatow?

  All right. Now, you know, we have listeners who are listening to this and they're going to ask, how do I get in on this? How soon might patients see autonomous robots? Perhaps this gallbladder surgery in the operating room?

• 24:45Speaker 03

  We are super excited to take the next steps and go to do a preclinical study. So demonstrating this in live surgeries, that's our next steps that we are very, very hard working on right now. I also see that similarly to modern cars where we have some autonomous functions like brake assist, park assist, those autonomous functions, we see those coming in surgical robotic systems for the next few years. So for example, the FDA approved recently a camera system that can follow the surgery autonomously. So the camera is moving autonomously, not the surgical tools. And now we can see maybe suction, maybe holding tissue, those

• 25:30Speaker 03

  things to be coming over the next few years. It's going to take a while before procedures like albladers are implemented clinically and commercially, but we can definitely see the path forward for those.

• 25:41Ira Flatow?

  So what's your next work here? I mean, you were studying this on a pig cadaver, right? Do you ever get to the living, breathing pig section?

• 25:50Speaker 03

  That's exactly the next step. So we demonstrated this on pig cadavers and now we are working very hard to see if we can do this in a living pig. That will be the next step. And then if we demonstrate that this is safe and effective, then we can really design a first in human study and work on the regulatory approval for that.

• 26:11Ira Flatow?

  What's the most challenging part about creating and training these robots?

• 26:15Speaker 03

  The most challenging part is getting the right training data. So we acquired about 30 different cadaver from butchers and then tested on all different anatomy and variations in the lab to acquire our testing data. And we also needed to kind of predict how our robot might make small little mistakes and then add them manually to the training data. So kind of start some procedures with maybe the clipper or the cutter being a little bit misaligned from the target so that we can self-correct then during the procedure. So you become a bit of a robot whisperer, you kind of anticipate mistakes, how could

• 26:59Speaker 03

  I fail? And then add that to the training data. So that's probably the most complex part of our work.

• 27:06Ira Flatow?

  You know, we have run out of time. I didn't get to ask you about how a robot scrubs up for surgery, but that's for the next time. We can talk about that.

• 27:15Speaker 03

  Thank you so much. That was fantastic questions.

• 27:19Ira Flatow?

  You're quite welcome and come on back when you're, you know, you're working a little more in vivo and live.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  Absolutely, would love to come back. Thank you so much for your interest and this fantastic interview, really enjoyed it.

• 27:30Ira Flatow?

  You're welcome. Dr. Alex Krieger, Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

• 27:42Ira Flatow?

  Thanks for listening and don't forget to rate and review the podcast, but only if you like the show. This episode was produced by Charles Berkowitz and Soshana Bhaskar. See you next time. I'm Ira Flatow.