World Space Week And Promising Climate Tech Companies

We check in on some exciting space missions and projects from IMAP to LIGO. Plus, climate tech companies that have our attention.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:17Ira 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.

• 0:34Flora Lichtman?

  Hey, I'm Flora Lichtman, and you're listening to Science Friday.

• 0:40Flora Lichtman?

  Today in the podcast, we are leaving planet Earth to wrestle with some of the big mysteries of space.

• 0:48Speaker 03

  You got to get deep into these things. You have to contemplate them. And as I'm sitting here, living in the cosmological realm for weeks, you know, my mind is in that space, I understand how people go mad.

• 0:59Flora Lichtman?

  Strappen.

• 1:03Flora Lichtman?

  Happy World Space Week to those who celebrate. We have been going hard, obviously, and to cap off the week, we are leaving the planet behind for a moment. Why not? Here to space out with us is astrophysicist Hakim Oluseyi. He's the author of the upcoming book, Why Do We Exist? The Nine Realms of the Universe That Make You Possible, and the host of the video podcast, Particles of Thought. Hakim, welcome to Science Friday.

• 1:30Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me. I am a huge fan.

• 1:33Flora Lichtman?

  We are honored. Okay, so as we know, space is big. There is no shortage of news, but you flagged a couple new missions that you think should be on our radar, including IMAP. What is that?

• 1:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, so IMAP is a mission that is going to study how our sun protects us from the dangerous radiation of intergalactic space. So our sun has this phenomenon known as the solar wind. It's blowing all the time at a million miles per hour, and it creates this bubble of magnetic field that kind of acts like a cosmic shield for us. So IMAP is going to study both, how the sun accelerates those particles to form the wind, but also the stuff that is entering our magnetic bubble, our shield, and coming into the interstellar system. So it's going to actually sample the local interstellar medium.

• 2:28Flora Lichtman?

  I didn't realize that the sun was actually protecting us because I feel like when I hear about the sun and solar wind and space weather, it's like it's all coming at us from the sun. But you're saying it protects us too?

• 2:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So both are occurring, right? We live inside the Earth's magnetic bubble that we call our magnetosphere. And the sun has a bigger magnetic bubble that encloses the entire solar system called the heliosphere. And the radiation that's coming from the sun is primarily just hydrogen nuclei, protons, right? They're dangerous. But what's coming from the galaxy is the stuff that's spewing out of black holes, coming from exploding stars. So it's way more dangerous. And the sun is our protector. So we need a protector from our protector.

• 3:13Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, that's interesting. Okay, so how does this mission work with the Parker Solar Probe, which we've covered on the show and we know made history recently with sort of the closest flyby? Is it going to upstage the Parker Solar Probe?

• 3:25Speaker 03

  They're going to work in sync. So you know NASA has a fleet of heliophysics satellites that monitor the sun from various locations, right? In the solar system, there are the Solar Dynamics Observatory, the Stereo Mission, Parker, IMAP. And so together, they can sample what's happening, where they are located, right? The actual solar wind itself, the magnetic fields that are in it, the particles that are in it. They can look back at Earth if need be, and they can measure the stuff coming into our solar system from elsewhere. So it's almost like having several eyes looking at in multiple different directions and protecting the Earth altogether, right? Space weather is a thing as much as, you know, Earth's surface weather.

• 4:11Flora Lichtman?

  Hmm. You know, one of the big mysteries we've talked about on Science Friday for many years is this niggling little question of what 95% of the universe is made of, this mystery of dark matter and dark energy.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:24Flora Lichtman?

  Have we made any progress there?

• 4:26Speaker 03

  Oh, man. You know, there's progress and there's progress. So the progress is that... We've eliminated everything we thought we knew.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  We think it's this, and then you, you know, you do studies or you look for it and you find out, well, it looks like it's not that after all. So dark matter and dark energy remain huge problems, right? But we have these new missions that are going to give us more information, more data. One is the Vera Rubin Telescope. I was a member of the early development team for it. It just got first light this summer. There's the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope that's coming up. You know, so what they're going to do is they're going to map out dark matter, which you can see through its gravitational effects. And it's going to look at the expansion rate of the universe over time to an incredibly high precision.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  Again, maybe not know exactly what dark energy is, but we can know what dark energy is not.

• 5:22Flora Lichtman?

  Are we getting into the Hubble crisis here?

• 5:24Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. So, so the currently, you know, we can measure the expansion rate of the universe nearby and, and it both in space and time. And we can measure the expansion rate of the universe at a time 13.5 billion years ago. And the problem is they don't agree. And the more precisely we make the measurements, the, the disagreement only grows, right? So this is a real crisis. And, and so with Rubin and with Nancy Grace Roman, hopefully we can go into that region where we currently don't have a lot of good data. And that, you know, you know, we don't know what the universe was doing in that period. And there was recent evidence from an experiment called DESI that we dark energy is getting weaker, right?

• 6:09Speaker 03

  It was thought to be a constant force in the universe. Now we're finding it may vary with time. So, you know, scientists get excited when there's something that we don't know. And this is squarely in that category.

• 6:22Flora Lichtman?

  Yes, we have talked to many astrophysicists on the show that are like, it's an amazing time to be alive.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  It is, it is because, you know, you can ask these questions, but you know, at the same time, you're kind of like, man, I wish I was alive 100 years from now.

• 6:37Flora Lichtman?

  So you could have some answers, you mean?

• 6:38Speaker 03

  Exactly. Exactly. You know, I was talking to one of the, um, discoverers of dark energy on the podcast last week. Uh, Adam Riess, who won the Nobel Prize for it. And I asked him, I said, hey, man, you know, I, I worked in this area myself at the turn of the century. And I was like, did you think it would take us this long to figure this out? You know, we thought that we would know by this time.

• 7:00Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah. What did he say?

• 7:02Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, what he said was, man, I didn't even believe it when I discovered it. Let alone getting to the point of thinking we're going to discover what it is. I wasn't even sure it was real. And he went on to say that it wasn't until I was actually at the Nobel Prize ceremony that I was, that I thought to myself, okay, maybe this is real.

• 7:23Flora Lichtman?

  That's amazing. Okay, more small questions for you. The name of your book is Why Do We Exist?

• 7:28Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 7:29Flora Lichtman?

  Why do we exist?

• 7:31Speaker 03

  Oh, be- because, you know, we are incredibly lucky. You know, I talk about the nine realms of the universe that make us possible. And, you know, if you take away any of those nine realms, like one of the realms is the dark realm, dark matter and dark energy, right? Without dark matter, we don't have galaxies forming, right? Without galaxies, we don't have star systems. And without star systems, we don't have planets, right? So there are so many layered elements to our existence from the cosmological realm of the very large to the quantum realm of the very small to the realm of life that really, uh, you know, does this thing with energy that seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics, right?

• 8:12Speaker 03

  You know, i- it creates order, you know, life creates order, creates higher complexity and takes advantage of these energy gradients to, uh, sustain itself. And this is, you know, when you really get an understanding of how Unlikely our existence is and what and I don't mean the existence of life itself. Right. I do a calculation in in my book of how many worlds should exist in our galaxy with large life forms like ourselves. And you know, it's like one out of a million star systems. But when you look at how many bodies should have life like, like we perhaps just discovered on Mars with this new data, you know, small bacteria, archaea, viruses, things

• 8:57Speaker 03

  like that, it could be in the billions, if not hundreds of billions. Right. So this universe is hostile to life and throughout the majority of its volume. Yet here we are.

• 9:10Flora Lichtman?

  Right. Here we are.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  It seems like an impossible inevitability is both impossible and inevitable. And here we are.

• 9:18Flora Lichtman?

  I have goosebumps. I mean, these are deep thoughts to how do they do they creep into your daily life?

• 9:23Speaker 03

  Oh, my goodness. You, you know, when you get trained in physics, you just don't see the world in the same way anymore. And I'm telling you, when I was writing this book, you got to get deep into these things. You have to contemplate them. And as I'm sitting here, living in the cosmological realm for weeks, you know, my mind is in that space. I understand how people go mad.

• 9:44Flora Lichtman?

  Yes, totally.

• 9:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:48Flora Lichtman?

  How did you get into this field, Hakeem?

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Oh, I it started when I was 10 years old. I was always interested in nature. And when I was a 10 year old, you know, I was an avid reader as a child back when books were a thing, right? And I decided I was going to read my family's set of encyclopedias from A to Z. And I got to E and I encountered Albert Einstein. And I encountered relativity. And I always loved things where we that were weird and magical. And that's exactly what Einstein and relativity are. So I became instantly obsessed. So fast forward to 17, I'm winning first place in the state science fair in Mississippi for writing a program that calculated all the effects of relativity.

• 10:33Flora Lichtman?

  You know? Wow, okay. You were committed.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  I was committed. I was obsessed. You know, that's the thing, right? Obsession can kind of look like discipline or commitment, but it's really just, you know, I can't take my mind off of this. I I just want to understand the nature of reality as it exists. And because it's so non-intuitive, you know, you can't just, you can't be an armchair quarterback and figure out how the universe works, right? It requires rigorous math, rigorous observations, rigorous experiments. And, you know, I realized that the way to get to deeper truth was to learn that scientific rigor. And then what I discovered was, you know, we've learned so much to this point. Maybe we can ask crazy questions like, why do we exist? That sound non-scientific, but our data has taken us so far

• 11:20Speaker 03

  that, you know, we're starting to get an inkling to the answers to some of these questions.

• 11:24Flora Lichtman?

  I love that. Okay, looking ahead, is there one of these missions or projects that you are looking forward to that really keeps you on the edge of your seat?

• 11:33Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I love the study of spacetime itself. And there's these two sets of experiments that will um give us some deeper insights. One already has, and these are these gravitational wave observatories like LIGO and Virgo. But another, which is also equally spectacular, is the Event Horizon Telescope that's imaging black holes at the cores of galaxies, our own and nearby ones like M87. You know, this is where spacetime takes on its most extreme behaviors. And so by studying nature at the extremes, we can learn more about the general, the mundane, and what's global. Uh, you know, spacetime eludes us. That's why we, you know, we're weirded out by dark matter and dark energy

• 12:18Speaker 03

  because essentially it's a spacetime effect. That's the stuff I'm looking forward to. What new insights are they going to give us about the nature of reality? And then, how do we take advantage of it with the technologies we're going to develop in the future?

• 12:34Flora Lichtman?

  I can't wait. Astrophysicist Hakim Oluseyi, his upcoming book, Why Do We Exist: The Nine Realms of the Universe That Make You Possible, comes to shelves this spring. Hakim also hosts the video podcast Particles of Thought, and you can find it on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks, Hakim.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  Thank you so much.

• 12:52Flora Lichtman?

  And if you're looking for more space travel, SciFridays Down to Earth has you covered. Join in on a cosmic mission to tackle climate change in your own backyard. No spacesuit required. Check out all the activities at sciencefriday.com/downtoearth.

• 13:10Flora Lichtman?

  Coming up after the break, Ira takes a look at some of the trends and innovations happening in climate tech. Stick around.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  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

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• 14:18Speaker 04

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• 14:32Ira Flatow?

  For better or worse, it's been a big year for climate tech. The Trump administration has slashed billions of dollars in funding for clean energy projects. On the other hand, other countries are ramping up their climate initiatives. The magazine MIT Technology Review recently published a list of climate tech companies to watch. They're ones that aren't just doing something innovative, but show real promise in driving down greenhouse gas emissions. Here to discuss the trends and inventions happening in climate tech is MIT Technology Review senior climate reporter Casey Crownhardt. Casey, welcome back.

• 15:12Speaker 05

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 15:13Ira Flatow?

  Okay, you've worked on this list of climate companies to watch for what? Three years now? How did you decide? How did you decide what companies made it into the list?

• 15:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is our third year putting this list together, and it's always a really kind of interesting exercise. We try to zoom out a little bit, think about what industries show promise, what countries, what geographies are going to be important in the coming year and years to come. Within that, what businesses are showing progress? Building pilot plants or raising a lot of money or showing new results that indicate that they could really help reduce greenhouse gas emissions or help us deal with climate change in the future.

• 15:57Ira Flatow?

  Did the cuts to climate funding here in the US affect your choices?

• 16:02Speaker 05

  Absolutely. This year, we actually reduced the number of companies on our list. So in past years, we've recognized 15. And just kind of in observance of what's going on in climate tech, we decided to scale back a little bit this year. So we have 10 companies on our list. We also kind of have an even more international list this year. In the past, it's kind of been a worldwide range of companies. But this year, we really focused on looking to Europe, looking to China, these other markets, while the US is kind of seeing this maybe a little bit of a slowdown.

• 16:35Ira Flatow?

  Well, it's it's it's a little bit more than a little slowdown, is it not? I mean, there are all kinds of things going on, all kinds of cuts.

• 16:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm trying to be a little bit positive. But no, absolutely. Like you mentioned at the top, you know, last week, there were announcements that the Department of Energy is terminating, you know, hundreds of grants worth over $7 billion for clean energy. And that's just a continuation of a trend in the US. We're still seeing, you know, private investment isn't kind of as dramatic of a story. The first half of this year, climate tech, private investment is holding steady. So globally, you know, it's not too terrible of a story. But yeah, definitely, public funding in the US is a huge turnaround from this time last year.

• 17:21Ira Flatow?

  And I think the one country we're seeing a huge turnaround in is China, right?

• 17:26Speaker 05

  China is absolutely the global leader in clean energy tech. And we definitely recognize that as we were putting the list together, you know, whether it's batteries, solar and wind, everything. But, you know, it's really not a turnaround, I would say. It's, you know, this country has been for, you know, nearly two decades, been slowly and surely building these industries up through really longstanding public support.

• 17:54Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, I guess what I meant by turnaround is they they're like, like the world's biggest fossil fuel emitter.

• 17:59Speaker 05

  Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that's true. And and to be fair, China does still get a really big portion of its electricity from coal. But you're seeing that a lot of the growth is absolutely coming from renewables. So yeah, that's really fair to say.

• 18:11Ira Flatow?

  And why is that so successful? What makes their clean energy projects, you know, stand out?

• 18:17Speaker 05

  I think that a lot of it comes from that foundation of just, you know, China in the 2000s saw that, you know, okay, everybody else has an auto industry. And as we build ours up, we're going to try to focus on something different. And so I think by, you know, giving a lot of subsidies, really focusing policy support for all of these technologies, China has been able to scale these industries. And so it's, you know, easier to build solar panels if you've built millions and millions of them before. So I think that that's it just comes down to some extent to an extended kind of deliberate effort to scale up these industries. And now they can make very, very cheap products.

• 19:00Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, let's talk about some of these companies on your list, specifically in China. A company in Beijing is scaling up sodium ion batteries. Is sodium ion a game changer?

• 19:14Speaker 05

  I'm really interested in sodium ion batteries and I've been following them for a while. So yeah, this company that we highlighted, Haina Battery Technology, they're a startup company making sodium ion cells. This tech could be less expensive than lithium ion batteries, just based on the materials. Sodium is much more abundant. And so we're really interested to see what this company can do. They already have batteries in sort of stationary storage plants on the grid, so to kind of, you know, help store renewable power. And they also have their batteries in electric scooters already. So we're really interested to see what happens with them. But they're also not the only one doing sodium ion batteries.

• 19:57Speaker 05

  You know, the big companies in China, CATL, BYD, also have really significant support behind this technology, too.

• 20:04Ira Flatow?

  And the competitive advantage, they have sodium ion over lithium?

• 20:09Speaker 05

  It's interesting because this is another example of battery technology where a lot of the kind of tech, a lot of the ideas were invented in the US. And there are some US companies building sodium ion batteries as well. But there was actually one big, high-profile one that shut down just recently. So again, I think that some people thought that sodium ion could be a way that the US kind of snuck in and kind of was more competitive with China on batteries. But we're really seeing, so far, China has no indications that China is slowing down.

• 20:42Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, and they could actually make an impact on the climate.

• 20:45Speaker 05

  Absolutely. I mean, I think transportation is one of the biggest, you know, sectors in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and the grid. So if you're able to, you know, I think that batteries are like basically a master key for the energy transition, which is why I'm always yapping about them. But yeah, if you can make a dent on transportation and on the energy sector, that's two really big ones right there.

• 21:09Ira Flatow?

  We also notice is that the AI data centers are taking up a huge amount of energy. And even the data center builders are trying to think of new ways to come up with how they might get that energy. What's going on here?

• 21:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're super on it on that. That trend is one we noticed as well. And so there's a ton of talk around how much energy we're going to need to to power these massive data centers. And so we noticed that in the US, you know, some of these companies that are maybe going to be able to help with that in the future. So nuclear, we noticed Kairos Power, building these kind of alternative next generation nuclear plants. Furvo Energy is a geothermal company that was kind of trying to do the same thing. If companies are able to kind of take advantage of all of this money and interest and excitement, that that could be kind of one way that people can win in this really tough climate tech environment in the US.

• 22:06Ira Flatow?

  Are there are there actually new nuclear power designs and companies that are that are taking advantage of them?

• 22:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, so Kairos, one of the companies on our list, they recently signed a deal to basically supply energy to Google for their data centers. And so the there are designs. I think one of the biggest questions when you hear about nuclear and data centers is the timeline. Because, you know, you can build a data center fairly quickly. New nuclear power takes a very long time to permit and to build and to start up. So that's kind of one caveat that I'll say is that it's exciting to see, you know, some of this money and and interest go towards these companies. But it's going to take a long time for that to actually execute and and make a dent in this energy demand.

• 22:53Ira Flatow?

  Did you notice any other themes as you put together this list?

• 22:57Speaker 05

  Absolutely. I think another one that we really noticed is that kind of critical minerals and materials is is really an interesting area and one that I think you could see some some positive moves in the US. So we highlighted one company called Cyclic Materials. They are trying to recycle. Rare earth magnets. So these are magnets that are in everything from speakers to EV motors and wind turbines and smartphones. And there's this concern that all of those materials are today processed in China, basically. And so this company is one of a growing industry that's trying to reclaim those rare earth magnets, recycle them, and be able to use that material again.

• 23:43Ira Flatow?

  Give me a quick 101 about what are these materials and why are they so important to recycle?

• 23:49Speaker 05

  Rare earth magnets are powerful magnets. So they're much more powerful than the iron-based magnets you might find on your fridge. And they're really the basis for a lot of electronics today. And they require some materials like neodymium that can be kind of concentrated, you know, on the planet. These aren't just, you don't just find them everywhere. They're not really all that rare, but they can be a little bit tough to refine. And so it's become this really interesting field where people are saying, you know, we have all of these magnets in your old iPhone that is sitting in a drawer somewhere, or, you know, these EVs that are starting to come off the road. And so it would use a lot less water, it would produce a lot less greenhouse gas

• 24:33Speaker 05

  emissions to, you know, reclaim those. You basically grind them up, put them through this chemical process, and you can, you know, reclaim those materials rather than having to go mine them again, refine them again, and so on. So

• 24:47Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, because so little of it gets recycled now, right?

• 24:50Speaker 05

  Very, very little. Globally, only about 0.2% of rare earths are recycled from used devices.

• 24:57Ira Flatow?

  All right, last question for you, Casey. Let's look ahead, even amidst all these cuts to climate funding here in the US. Is there a technology that you're hoping has, for lack of a better word, a breakthrough in the coming year?

• 25:14Speaker 05

  That's a really tough one. I'm really excited about the electric vehicle companies that we included on this list. So Triton in Europe is really working on getting electric trucks on the road. And I think that that could be a real breakthrough if we can continue to get, you know, more of our road transport electrified, keep building out the charging infrastructure to be able to charge these vehicles quickly. That's another one that I'm really excited to see if they can have kind of this commercial or uptake breakthrough.

• 25:45Ira Flatow?

  And the Chinese, other companies are making some incredible electric vehicles, but I don't see the Trump administration allowing any of them to get here.

• 25:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's really interesting. And everybody who goes to China or gets to see these vehicles says, you know, it's it's night and day that the technology that's in those cars, how cheap they're starting to become. Absolutely. I don't see anybody kind of catching up to China's lead anytime soon.

• 26:14Ira Flatow?

  Well, I want to thank you for taking the time to be with us today.

• 26:16Speaker 05

  Thank you so much for having me. Always so much fun.

• 26:19Ira Flatow?

  It's always good to have you, Casey. Casey Crownhart, Senior Climate Reporter for MIT Technology Review.

• 26:29Flora Lichtman?

  If you like the show, rate and review us wherever you listen, or just go straight to guerrilla marketing. Take a friend's phone and subscribe them to this podcast. Please help us get the word out about Science Friday. Today's episode was produced by Charles Berquist and Rasha Aridi. But a lot of folks help make this show happen every single week, including

• 26:51Speaker 06

  Annie Nero. Jason Rosenberg.

• 26:54Speaker 07

  John Dankoski.

• 26:55Flora Lichtman?

  Danielle Johnson. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.

• 27:06Speaker 00

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