Health, Astronomy, And Climate Experts On 2024’s Coolest Science

Ira is joined on stage by researchers from three different fields to reflect on all that 2024 brought us in the world of science.

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

• 0:00Flora Lichtman?

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• 0:50Speaker 01

  Yet again, it's been another big year in science. So we asked three experts what made their list of science highlights.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  I'm wondering about the human advances because it's been a long time since we've had like a really big step in humans visiting outer space.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  It's Friday, December 27th, and you're listening to Science Friday.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  I'm Sci-Fri producer Rasha Iridi. A lot happened this year, from a total solar eclipse to the discovery of the oldest known fossil reptile skin. At a live event, Ira Flatow sat down with three experts from the fields of public health, astrophysics, and climate science to hear their sciencey highlights from the year.

• 1:34Ira Flatow?

  This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow with WNYC from the green space of New York City.

• 1:42Ira Flatow?

  It has been an exciting and hectic year in science discovery and innovation. We've reported on stories from across the fields of science, from urban climate plans to panda conservation, from AI energy consumption to the spread of bird flu, from ancient bird brains to what's going on in your gut. And with us now are three scientific experts and researchers here to reflect on the most exciting discoveries in their field. The important stories you might have missed and tell us what they're looking forward to in 2025. So please welcome my guest, Dr. Celine Gounder, internationally renowned internist, infectious disease specialist, and epidemiologist. She is the senior fellow

• 2:25Ira Flatow?

  and editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News. Welcome back to the show. Dr. Jackie Farady, astrophysicist at the famous American Museum of Natural History, just up the road a piece, working to characterize the atmospheres of worlds beyond our solar system. She also creates immersive public programs in the museum's planetarium. Welcome to the program. And Professor Kevin Reed, chief climate scientist at the New York Climate Exchange, where he leads the strategic direction of research programs and associate provost for climate and sustainability programming at Stony Brook University out there in Long Island. Welcome.

• 3:09Ira Flatow?

  Thanks for having me. Celine, let me begin with you. What do you think is the biggest news story out of public health from this year?

• 3:18Speaker 04

  So this series of papers from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, published in The Lancet just a couple of weeks ago, looks at what's called the Human Development Index, which is a composite of health, income, and education, and looked at where do we stand in this country based on demographics and generation. And the finding that I thought was most striking, which I think also feeds into this moment politically, was that if you take people 75 and older, you take the top decile, again in terms of health, income, education, that top decile of the over 75 is 50% white men, 35% white women, and then

• 4:01Speaker 04

  a mix. And then you go down to people under 40. Again, you take that top 10% in terms of health, income, and education, you go from 50% white men in that oldest age group to 5% white men in that youngest age group. And that matters because

• 4:20Speaker 04

  It's not just your status in terms of human development index that matters. It's also change in status that really impacts the way people look at things and think about things. And so we are seeing a number of different trends in terms of opioid overdose, suicide, gun violence. All of this is related to some of these changes in status. This also relates to economic situations. What's happened with manufacturing, globalization, automation, loss of jobs. And by the way, that is a tiny preview of what is to come with AI. We have not prepared for that at all. And this is having very real health consequences across the country.

• 5:00Ira Flatow?

  In what way?

• 5:01Speaker 04

  Well, again, we've seen what are called the diseases of despair rise over the past decade plus. So a huge increase in suicides, a huge increase of drug overdose and deaths from gun violence. And there are some solutions that are being proposed. One I just would highlight for your audience, there's a guy by the name of Richard Reeves who's really focused on this issue of what's happening to men in our society. And as a woman who's interested in women's health, I also understand that we cannot fight for women's health and expect to have, achieve equity and the progress we want if you're leaving men behind. And so this, Richard Reeves, I would highly recommend his book, Boys and Men. But some of the recommendations he has with respect to education is to actually redshirt

• 5:44Speaker 04

  boys by a year or two because of their maturity level and ability to learn. The idea being that they will be better students if given a little bit more time, start a year or two later than girls. The other is to encourage more men to take jobs in what's called the pink industry, so health and education. And these are areas that are less susceptible to automation, AI. These are jobs that we will be needing more and more into the future, especially in the health sector. And this benefits women because when you have an industry that is more balanced in terms of gender representation, you have less ghettoization, women's status also goes up commensurately. So those are just some of the examples. And this has impacts in terms of health.

• 6:26Ira Flatow?

  Wow. Thanks, Celine. This is, this is really interesting news. I'm not sure it's, it's great news. We're going to come back to talk more about public health soon, but let's shift for a bit. Look at the skies, Jackie. There was lots of exciting news about the moon and Mars this year, right? But your, your research goes a little bit further away. From home, what's your top news story from this year from the world of astrophysics?

• 6:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and take us off of Earth right now.

• 6:54Ira Flatow?

  I'm ready.

• 6:55Speaker 05

  As we discussed, because I think that's good for all of us right now. And the reason for that is because that's also what I study. But in thinking of like top stories.

• 7:05Ira Flatow?

  Top stories.

• 7:05Speaker 05

  Top stories. One of the things I just want to tell people is that there's a telescope and it's called the James Webb Space Telescope. Everybody know it? Yes? Yeah, it's a good one. It looks at the sky in infrared wavelengths. That's not something that your eye is attuned to. So what I would say, what's happening in 2024, so the telescope was launched in 2020, Christmas Day 2020. And then it took a while for it to get there and it took a while for us to start calibrating. So really by 2024, we're starting to see some really good results. And one of the ones I was gonna highlight for you is actually one that I led. And I think it represents one of these things where like you can look up and you get a

• 7:48Speaker 05

  wavelength coverage that you've never seen and you can discover something that no one's ever seen before. And what we did was we turned the telescope to an object with a name that's not gonna excite you, it's WISE 1935. I'm sorry, it doesn't have a better name. And what we saw when we looked at it, we used one of the instruments on JWST, we put the light through what's called a spectrograph, you break the light up, you see what the atmosphere is made of. And what we saw was some of the stuff we expected. You see some ammonia, you see some water in vapor form, you see carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, and then we saw something we had not seen before in another object. We saw methane gas, which you do see in a lot of things, but you usually see it absorbing,

• 8:32Speaker 05

  but we did not see it absorbing. We saw it in emission. So it was glowing. And that had not been seen outside of the solar system before. We had to come up with an explanation for what it might be. And what we did is we turned to the solar system to try and help us explain this. And we looked at Jupiter, and Jupiter has this happening on it. Jupiter has it for a reason, it's actually another Story of 2024, which is something you all might have seen this year, which is something called an aurora. The northern lights or the southern lights. And what we saw was what we theorize, because we can't know for sure for sure.

• 9:10Speaker 05

  But we think that actually the phenomenon that we were seeing shown by the James Webb Space Telescope is an object light years away from you. With a phenomenon that's akin to what you might see here. But the other zipper of this is that the reason why the planets in our solar system get the aurora is we have the sun. We have the sun, which gives off this beautiful amount of energy and light. That's why we're all here and happy. And then it also slams us with electromagnetic radiation that trickles down from our magnetic field and you get the light up. So that's what causes our aurora. Jupiter has a special other aurora. And it is caused by its active volcanic moon called Io. Io is volcanic.

• 9:51Speaker 05

  It spews out a plasma, gets trapped with Jupiter. The object that we discovered, this phenomenon happening is isolated, has no parent star. So the phenomenon also pointed us to the idea that maybe we were actually seeing an interaction from a moon that was orbiting it.

• 10:09Ira Flatow?

  What was the object? Do we know what it was?

• 10:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, I would say it was actually discovered by a citizen scientist, by a regular person that worked on a program that I co-founded. It's called Backyard World: Planet 9. I encourage anybody listening or here to join the program because the one thing that's amazing about science is that anybody can and should do it. And you can join any of these citizen science projects. It's a very low mass object. It's about 20 times the mass of Jupiter, light years away from you.

• 10:39Ira Flatow?

  Is it a brown dwarf?

• 10:40Speaker 05

  Yes, yes, sorry, Ira. Yes, you're leading me to the water. I know. Yes, it's a brown dwarf. It's an object in between a star and a planet. It's got properties of both. Doesn't have enough mass for hydrogen fusion in it. So it's just cooling for its life.

• 10:53Ira Flatow?

  So that's what the surprising part is part of it? Is that it's glowing instead of?

• 10:58Speaker 05

  Yes, it's glowing. And the glowing is not something it can do on its own. It cannot ignite that methane. It's happening in the upper atmosphere of the object. The only ex- well, it could be a new phenomenon in physics that we haven't figured out on one of these objects. I don't want to just say we found a moon. I always say this. I'm not saying we found a moon, but I'm kind of saying. Maybe, maybe we need a moon to actually see so it can send the plasma over to the object.

• 11:29Ira Flatow?

  Tell us about Dan Castleton and Backyard Worlds. Is that part?

• 11:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, so Dan Castleton is the citizen scientist that worked with us that discovered the object. And he discovered it honestly. So Backyard Worlds, Planet Nine. Initially, what we were trying to actually do is do the same method that discovered Pluto, which is you take images of the sky taken with a time baseline in between them and you blink them. It's called, get ready for it, the blink method. So it's called the blink method. And so you just blink images and if you see an object jump, then it may be telling you that you found something really good. Now, you can use AI, machine learning, and we do that as well, but actually the human eye, believe it or not, is phenomenal at this.

• 12:15Speaker 05

  It's really good at pattern recognition. It can get through stuff that AI frankly, we can have lots of conversations about it, but it's not as great at. Dan found it, sent it to us, and we then followed it up with Ilet, a James Webb Space Telescope proposal. Dan is a member of our James Webb team.

• 12:33Ira Flatow?

  Wow.

• 12:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, you could also be on a James Webb proposal.

• 12:36Ira Flatow?

  I'm happy to join. Where do you go from here with the knowledge you have now? Is there another step you can do in the discovery?

• 12:43Speaker 05

  So the fact that it's there really opens the doors. We didn't realize we could look for this before. It's also, I'll tell you one thing that's important that astronomers are trying to do with the James Webb Space Telescope. One of the things we'd really love to do is discover something we haven't seen before, a molecule that we've never seen before. But then you can arrange all of your proposals around going after it. So I, in setting up this observation, I had not arranged to look for that particular area. I didn't get an Enough signal in there. I didn't know it was gonna happen. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, sometimes you need to see it so that then the next round, we can prioritize

• 13:26Speaker 05

  that kind of observation. And all my colleagues now are all up on it. So now we're thinking very carefully about how you can find aurora spectroscopically like this.

• 13:37Ira Flatow?

  Well, you'll come back and tell us more when you do find it.

• 13:39Speaker 05

  A hundred percent.

• 13:40Ira Flatow?

  Okay. We need to take a break, but we'll be back with more from our Year in Review Celebration held earlier this month at WNYC's Green Space in New York. Stay with us.

• 13:57Ira 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.

• 14:33Speaker 06

  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

• 15:15Speaker 06

  King in the Florida Everglades to learn about his unlikely journey into science and how to study a wetland when it's not very, well, wet. So don't miss out. Follow Going Wild with Dr. Ray Wynn. Win grand on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. WNYC is supported by Bear. Every day in America, science delivers, not just in the headlines, but in the moments that matter most. Science is a journey, one of curiosity, persistence, and progress. It's about asking questions, testing, learning, and improving again and again. Science delivers harvests that feed families, tools that help farmers grow more with less, and new ways to protect land for generations to come.

• 15:58Speaker 06

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• 16:07Speaker 07

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• 16:43Ira Flatow?

  I'm Kevin Roos. 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.

• 17:12Ira Flatow?

  Kevin, let's shift back to our planet for a moment. Your work has you working with teams of researchers studying our climate. As well as in collaboration with communities most directly affected by climate change. I'm almost afraid to ask this. What is the state of climate change as we end up 2024?

• 17:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, let's start with the bad news, Ira, which is every year at the beginning of the year, most people are thinking about their resolutions. And as a climate scientist, we're looking back at the previous year and we're saying, how much worse did it get? Right? And so let's start with the fact that 2023, we learned earlier this year, was the hottest year on record. And 2024 is on pace to beat that. And what we've learned, actually, through some reports that have come out of New York State, so there's been the New York State Impacts Assessment, there's also been the New York Panel on Climate Change, which is focused right here in the city. And we're seeing that it's not just temperature that's changing, right? It's precipitation. So in New York, annual precipitation has increased by 10 to 20% since 1900. And it certainly doesn't feel like that when you go through a fall in which you've been in a drought, right?

• 18:16Speaker 07

  But that's actually a telltale sign of climate change as well, that you teeter totter between those extremes. But it's really just not this general increase in precipitation. It's what we see on social media, it's what you see in the news, right? Which is every time there's a rainfall event in New York City, we've all seen images of the subway flooding at some point, right? Water rushing down the stairs. And this is really, again, a telltale sign that the climate change is here and is starting to impact our weather. Out where I teach at Stony Brook University, we actually have two dorms that are actually out of service this year because as students were moving in in August is when we experienced almost 10 inches of rain. And there are communities right here on Long Island out there that have changed to the point where the ponds that have been there, the dams that have been there are gone and they're not coming back. Right? And so these are people's livelihoods and cultures that are changing.

• 19:01Speaker 07

  And that's just New York. I mean, when you look at the world, these signs are everywhere. Changes in extreme heat, changes in drought, and it's really, really starting to impact society. But let's go to some good news really quick.

• 19:13Ira Flatow?

  Please.

• 19:14Speaker 07

  Okay, so some good news that we learned this year is that, yeah, one of the other impacts of climate change that we often hear about is the destruction of coral reefs. Right? So there's been some, in a study earlier this year that actually showed that, you know, some parts of coral reefs might be a little bit more resilient, right? So it might not be As bleak as we thought, so there won't be complete devastation. And that at least suggests, right, from a biodiversity standpoint, that there's still a chance.

• 19:37Ira Flatow?

  That is some good news.

• 19:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's some good news. Another good news is that you can look around our local waterways, right here in the New York area, out on Long Island. And we've shown that actually through targeted efforts of trying to revamp, let's say, for example, the Shinnecock Bay out on Long Island, you can actually do this through restoring shellfish. And it can actually clean up the water that has been impacted, both by fertilizer, but also by climate change.

• 20:01Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, we actually did a story on that.

• 20:03Speaker 07

  And I think, for me, the most exciting news is actually just this year, the state of New York hooked up its first utility-scale offshore wind farm, just off of Long Island. And now we actually receive about 130 megawatts of energy from clean renewable wind from offshore. So what does that mean? That's about 70,000 homes that can be powered by offshore wind. And that's just a drop in the bucket in which New York is hoping to get to, which is about nine gigawatts, right, by 2035. So that's almost 100 times increase, and we're getting that clean energy.

• 20:37Ira Flatow?

  This is becoming cheaper and cheaper, isn't it? It's not just trying to become greener, but it's also economically the right way to go.

• 20:45Speaker 07

  That's right. So right now, solar and onshore wind are the cheapest forms of electricity. If you want to develop a new electricity power plant right now, the cheapest way to do it is through onshore wind or solar. And it's cheaper than coal, it's cheaper than natural gas, and it's cheaper than nuclear energy.

• 21:03Ira Flatow?

  And how do you think the change in administration, the new Trump administration, will affect these climate change mitigation efforts?

• 21:10Speaker 07

  So we're sticking with the good news, right? Look, I just talked a little bit about that momentum, right? That over the last 10 years, we've doubled renewable energy in this country. States like New York, which are leading through its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act aren't turning back. Companies aren't turning back. They're making guarantees that they're going to be trying to go to net zero by certain dates. Their shareholders expect it. They're going to start to continue this momentum. And so in that sense, right, once you start rolling, it's going to be hard to stop, especially when it's the cheapest form of energy there is. And so what it just means is that under, you know, in the next four years, so that's the important thing to note, right, that administrations come and go. And that climate change is a local challenge, right?

• 21:55Speaker 07

  Adaptation and resilience happens at the local level. And so it just means that there'll be more leadership occurring at the places like the city of New York and cities around us, and that that's where the leadership will be for the next four years. And so we should really turn to those experts and those leaders and empower them to do that.

• 22:13Ira Flatow?

  But we've heard and we've seen some talk and action also about returning to nuclear power. I'm saying Microsoft just announced they're going to buy power from the one reactor at Three Mile Island that's going to be coming back online. Is nuclear a viable option with these smaller, cheaper, supposedly safer little reactors?

• 22:34Speaker 07

  So let's start with the basics, right? So 20% of the electricity in the United States comes from nuclear, and it's been that way since the early 90s. Nuclear energy has been an important component of our electricity generation in the United States, as well as globally and in other nations. In terms of going back to what I said a few minutes ago, it still remains, solar and wind are still cheaper than the nuclear power plant. They're actually quicker, right? You can build them sooner. The typical timeline is at least six years for even these smaller reactors, because it's new technology. And the nice thing about the clean forms of energy, like renewable, is they don't require a fuel, right? Which is a cost which also has sustainability efforts in the long run. And, you know, I want to actually take this an opportunity to talk about another good

• 23:16Speaker 07

  news story that I saw that came out this year from the University of Tennessee, which was around one of the things of why we're talking about nuclear and bringing it back is, well, offshore wind and wind and solar, these are intermittent, right? What happens when the sun doesn't shine? Well, we figured that out. It's called batteries, by the way. But the aspect of that is that it's not as impactful on the grid as you'd think, right? And so the other worry is, oh, well, what happens when there's a storm? We're going to lose power. Well, they've actually done the study. They've looked at the data and they've done the modeling. And it turns out that if you have a grid that's completely reliant on renewable energy, it doesn't have any more power outages than one that's focused on a coal source, for example.

• 23:56Ira Flatow?

  Right. So, Leanne, let's get back to you talking about another story in public health I want to highlight, and that is bird flu, H5N1, spreading worldwide. There are outbreaks in poultry and dairy cows here in the U.S. Should we, is something to worry about?

• 24:12Speaker 04

  Well, we're coming up on five years since COVID, right? Have we learned the lessons?

• 24:17Ira Flatow?

  Uh-oh.

• 24:19Speaker 04

  No, we haven't. So, we first saw H5N1 bird flu among wild birds, then poultry, huge number of other mammals. Then this year was reported that we now saw infections among dairy cattle. In the poultry industry, H5N1 is deadly to poultry, so they just cull all the birds when they have an infection. And we've actually had over 100 million birds culled as a result of H5N1. And by the way, that's why your eggs are so expensive. It's not inflation. Then you have now infections in the dairy cattle industry, where it's not deadly to cattle, but it is being transmitted through the milk. And we are concerned that it may be reducing milk production, so you have that piece.

• 25:01Speaker 04

  There's a lot of industry pushback against testing, because if they have a positive test, what does that mean in terms of their ability to move cattle, to sell their milk? They may have to dispose of that. They're huge economic losses. The USDA announced a program earlier this year to compensate cattle farmers if they do have infections on their farms. There's been very little uptake, probably because they still don't see the compensation as outweighing the risks involved to them financially. And meanwhile, we're continuing to see infections transmitted from poultry to workers, as well as from dairy cattle to farm workers. And this is dangerous because you're creating-

• 25:43Speaker 04

  Situation where you're more likely to see the virus evolve to better infect humans. In fact, in the journal Science was reported that researchers have found that a single mutation, a switch in a receptor called the sialic acid receptor going from a, what's a 2.3 to a 2.6, for those who are steeped in the virology, will cause the virus to adapt from being really tailored to infect birds. Also for the eyes, which is why we've been seeing a lot of these eye infections in humans. But with that one point mutation, it becomes then more infectious to our lungs, which is where you get pneumonia, kind of like what we saw with COVID in the early days.

• 26:25Speaker 04

  There was a case in British Columbia recently of a teen who was infected with a form of H5N1 that did go into the lungs. He was in the ICU hospitalized for weeks as a result of this.

• 26:36Ira Flatow?

  What's the lesson we didn't learn that you were hinting at from COVID?

• 26:40Speaker 04

  Remember, too much testing?

• 26:42Ira Flatow?

  We should be doing more-

• 26:43Speaker 04

  We should be doing a lot of testing. That is how you have like radar and a sense of what's happening. You're seeing how the virus is evolving. So we're not doing enough testing in the dairy industry because of the industry fears of huge financial losses. We're not doing enough testing among the farmworkers. So if a farmworker on a farm tests positive, that means cattle or poultry probably have it too. The farmworkers don't want to get tested because many of them are here as undocumented immigrants or have family members who are. And we're having a huge issue or a huge politicization of immigration right now. These are people who do not want to be on any kind of government register of any kind. They don't want to come forward to healthcare providers. They just want to stay under the radar.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  So they're not getting tested. So we're in a situation where we have no idea what we're dealing with. And so it's very hard to make plans to respond.

• 27:36Ira Flatow?

  So I want to move on because we have a limited amount of time. I want to go back to you, Jackie, talking more about the JWST telescope as being very busy this year. You talked about this brown dwarf, but what about this exoplanet that you've discovered? Really cold?

• 27:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, really cold, right.

• 27:54Ira Flatow?

  How cold is it?

• 27:56Speaker 05

  Hmm, how cold is it? Well, I'm gonna tell you the value, but it's not how cold it is. It's how cold it is and we could detect it directly. There's about 5,000 planets that we know orbit other stars, not our star. We have eight, not nine, eight planets in our own solar system, right? We're good? Just leaving Pluto out of it. I know, I heard it. Somebody said, "Oh." I get it. It's hard. But, forget it. Not talking about that. Outside of the solar system, there's about 5,000 we've discovered. More than 70% of those were detected because we looked at the star and we saw the star do something that indicated there was a planet around it.

• 28:40Speaker 05

  It doesn't mean we saw the planet. It means we saw the influence of the planet on the star. And so, more than 70% of them have been found through these other methods. And there was one that was discovered. We knew it was there, around a star called Epsilon Indi. It's in this constellation called Indus. It's a cool constellation. You can actually see the star with your naked eye. If you go outside, not in New York City, you might be able to catch it. Okay, I encourage you to do that. You have to go south, though. So, it's a star that's a little bit less massive than our own sun. And this result is what I call a hail mary attempt by the James Webb Space Telescope. We were trying to see how we could use the James Webb Space Telescope

• 29:25Speaker 05

  to directly detect, not the other thing I just told you about how we see the influence that the planet has on the star, but to actually see the planet. And so, James Webb was used to try and find. We knew it was there because we had used a different method to say, "No, no, no, it's doing something to the star. We know it's there." And then we looked and we saw it. And so, are you ready for the temperature?

• 29:47Ira Flatow?

  I'm ready.

• 29:49Speaker 05

  Two hundred and eighty degrees Kelvin.

• 29:52Ira Flatow?

  That's pretty chilly.

• 29:53Speaker 05

  It's a balmy day. It's a balmy day at the North Pole. I have to say it in Kelvin because that's how my brain was thinking right now and I didn't want to do a wrong conversion for you. So, I said it in Kelvin. But it's just think of it, it's like a cold day at the North Pole. Actually, actually, Ira, it's not that much colder than the object I first told you about. It's a kind of a brown dwarf temperature. So it's cold, it's more like a Jupiter. It's a Jupiter-like planet.

• 30:18Ira Flatow?

  Wow.

• 30:19Speaker 05

  But we saw it.

• 30:20Ira Flatow?

  So it's giving off some amount of heat that you can detect it?

• 30:23Speaker 05

  That's right. So, the light that we get from it is because they're big enough that they're still actually radiating away the energy from when they formed.

• 30:31Ira Flatow?

  That is amazing.

• 30:32Speaker 05

  It's good. It's a good result.

• 30:33Ira Flatow?

  It's good, yeah, you know. I love talking about all this kind of stuff. So I want to talk to Kevin a little bit because we talk peripherally about AI and how it's entered all of our lives. It's changing technology with health and with art. And what about climate change? How was AI impacting our discussion of it, our use of it?

• 30:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, it's evolving fast. There was a report that came out in the journal Nature from Google that they've developed a new AI tool that can forecast the weather out to fifteen days. Right? So your favorite weather app that can go out to fifteen days. And it can do so with a skill that's better than the state of the art right now, which is the European Center's forecast. And they're doing this in a fraction of the computational cost that it takes to run an operational model. And that's just one example. And so, the potential of artificial intelligence to replace a lot of the conventional tools we use to do science and to do forecasting, both of weather and of climate, is really immense.

• 31:39Speaker 07

  There's this really important, I think, application of AI that we're going to start to see more and more of in the coming years and that we've started to see already just this year, which is... Most climate and climate change occurs at first at a global level, right? But we live right here and our home is at a specific address, right? In a certain part and we're often curious about, well, will my house flood? Hyper local. Yes, hyper local, yeah, that whatever that means, right? And AI offers the potential to run through that gamut of models that gets you from a climate model, which is very large scale, right? To a regional model, to a hydraulic model, to a flooding model, to a damage model. And if you can actually use AI to train to go across that kind of sweep, it's allow

• 32:22Speaker 07

  us to actually take climate information and get it at that quote unquote, hyper local level. And I, and I think that that's going to be a huge opportunity for us to really understand the physical risk of climate change and to actually really understand the implications of the different types of solutions that we might want to use for adaptation and resilience. However, just like everything, there's no free lunch, right? As we've already alluded to already with the discussion around Microsoft, these data centers that often are used for a lot of these AI algorithms are very, very expensive and they actually require a lot of energy. And where is that energy mostly coming from? Well, it's coming from the electric grid. And so that also means that in the current setup, if as we build new data centers for

• 33:07Speaker 07

  AI applications, they actually can increase the amount of carbon dioxide that's emitted into the atmosphere. Of course, as our grid becomes more renewable, that that will become less of a challenge. But in these kind of next two, three, five, 10 years, there's a real potential that there can actually be an impact of these applications on the amount of emissions. And once, and if, you know, if we haven't talked about it before, once carbon dioxide's up in the atmosphere, it stays up there for a couple hundred years, right? Couple hundred years. And so it's important that we start to think about that when we start to scale up these applications for climate.

• 33:40Ira Flatow?

  We need to take a break and when we come back, the role of AI in public health, areas for collaboration between the sciences and some stories to keep an eye on in the coming year. Stay with us.

• 33:55Ira 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. I'm Kevin Roos. 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

• 34:40Ira Flatow?

  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.

• 35:00Ira Flatow?

  Solene, let's think about AI and how it affects your work as an epidemiologist and a public health person.

• 35:05Speaker 04

  I think the impact of AI is going to be more limited for a few reasons. One is you need to train your AI on data. And data in the public health world is highly siloed. I think this is one thing that people still don't understand, you know, coming out of the COVID pandemic, is that most of your public health powers are at the state and/or local level. And so they each own the data. And so how much will they share? This is a huge problem we had in terms of data feeding up to the CDC, data feeding up from local jurisdictions and state health departments, getting data from healthcare systems. And so when the data is so siloed and you're not able to piece it together on which to train your AI, you have limitations. There are some

• 35:48Speaker 04

  amazing new advancements that could potentially feed into AI systems like what we call meta-genomics, where you take a sample of, let's say, sewage, and you could sequence everything in that sewage and know what are all the viruses and bacteria and parasites and so on. Imagine if we were doing that all over the world. And so you could, using that, do surveillance. Combine that with other kinds of surveillance, like what we call syndromic surveillance. This is where you're looking for people with certain symptoms, like flu-like symptoms, coming into the ER. You could combine that with other kinds of reporting, what's coming out of labs who are diagnosing those patients, et cetera. But if those data sets remain siloed and we're not able to train AI across those data

• 36:31Speaker 04

  sets, that will limit what the impact can be.

• 36:34Ira Flatow?

  You all have spoken a bit about your areas of scientific research and what can be done more by working better together with other industries. Let's start with you, Celine. What areas of scientific research do you hope to see more collaboration with in 2025?

• 36:52Speaker 04

  There are a few, and they relate to some of the things I talked about before. I think, well, climate change and public health, for sure. I think climate change is going to be one of the big drivers of many public health issues in the future. A lot of the pandemics that we've seen over the years, whether that's Ebola related to deforestation and increasing human contact with wildlife, COVID, actually some of the same factors. We will see more infectious diseases emerge. We will see the spread of dengue, for example, and other mosquito-borne diseases. So I do think there needs to be huge collaboration with folks working climate change. Air quality, water quality, or some other ones, heat waves and the impact on health.

• 37:32Speaker 04

  Another one would be, as I was talking about, those papers on the Human Development Index and health and income and education. These things are really intertwined. And we need to be studying these things in collaboration with our colleagues in those spaces. And then finally, the other area is around political polarization. And how can we re-instill trust in science? How do we de-politicize some of these things that really should not be political issues?

• 38:02Ira Flatow?

  And Jackie, what about astronomy and astrophysics? Are there collaboration ideas here that we'll see more of in the future?

• 38:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think one of the things that's happening in astronomy is in when you're using a telescope like the James Webb Space Telescope and you're looking for molecules and you're trying to figure out phenomenon, it ends up needing cross collaboration with other sciences that aren't, that we do collaborate with, but not enough. And what I see as important are chemists. There's a lot of things that we discover that we're like, oh, I've never seen the molecule act that way. We actually need more things that happen on Earth where you get your chemist friends to gear up their labs, where they have these like very, very complex ways to get to different pressures and temperatures of a given molecule and they can actually see what it might be doing. That does happen in geologic departments and so geology, I think, needs to collaborate more with astronomy.

• 38:54Speaker 05

  I'd really like to see more cosmochemistry. So crossing between chemistry and astronomy right now, specifically since this is a year in review show, I would say I would like to see that happen for 2025 next year.

• 39:08Ira Flatow?

  All right, let's go to the audience. Who's got the microphone and let's begin right over here.

• 39:12Speaker 07

  So Jackie, I think Ira hit the other two panels with the AI question. I wonder, since you were a downer on AI earlier in your.

• 39:18Speaker 05

  Ooh, I wasn't a downer.

• 39:19Speaker 07

  I know.

• 39:20Speaker 05

  I got misinterpreted, but go ahead.

• 39:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I think obviously machine learning has been in astrophysics and physics for since the beginning of time. I mean, do you see something as a quantum improvement in terms of your feel regarding the application of AI in the coming years?

• 39:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, what I was saying is that I use both techniques. I brought up citizen scientists and it's in part because I often get asked, why are you using people to do a job you could actually set AI onto? And what I was saying, and I think this is across the fields and I have listened to a lot of AI talks, AI does not replace everything that humans do. It's not good enough yet at it. And that is very true in astrophysics, that we do not, we have used it, we've used it with differing levels of success in order to discover new things, to classify new things. So I was just referring to as the human eye is still. Amazing at doing astronomy. We are very far from being replaced.

• 40:16Speaker 05

  But in the next, next year, there's a telescope coming online. It's called Rubin Observatory, named after the great, amazing Vera Rubin. And what that is going to do is it's going to image the sky as seen from the southern hemisphere from Chile. It's going to image it every three nights, the whole of the sky that you could see. It is a fire hose of data that's going to come in. And I'm not kidding, it is, astronomers are worried about the data volume. And so the conversation right now is heightened amongst us astronomers about how we're going to use machine learning and AI tools to parse that data, make discoveries quick so we can follow them up. Because we're going to start to see what's called the transient universe at a level we have never had access to before.

• 40:59Speaker 05

  So for 2025, you will start seeing far more results, I think, with this telescope coming online. Because that kind of data set demands these kinds of tools.

• 41:10Ira Flatow?

  That is really cool. Okay, another question. Yes, over here. Uh, first, which do you think is worse, 1918 flu or fully adapted bird flu?

• 41:23Speaker 04

  Um, it's very difficult to be making those comparisons. When we've seen H5N1 overseas, uh, it's had a 30 to 50% case fatality rate. Covid ended up having a less than 1% case fatality rate. And we still, still had over a million people die in this country. Fortunately, what we've seen in this country with the H5N1 bird flu cases so far, they have been relatively mild, uh, with the exception of that one case in, in, well, in Canada, in British Columbia. Right now, we're crossing our fingers that it stays that way. But that's not, crossing your fingers is not a really good plan.

• 41:59Ira Flatow?

  Yeah. Next, next question over there.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  So, um, you've been talking a lot about like AI advances and like space technology. But like, I'm wondering about the, uh, like the human advances. Because we have, it's been a long time since we've had like a really big step in like humans visiting outer space. Or something like a, another step, like visiting the moon or something like that. And we haven't really had like anything big about that.

• 42:27Ira Flatow?

  Jackie?

• 42:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, it's coming soon, very soon. You look young, I think. You look like you may be a part of the next generation. We are also very young on this stage and maybe we'll go. I should not have insulted us. But the, so there's a mission called Artemis, which NASA is slating for the next time that we will be sending people to the moon. We have not sent anybody to the moon since the 70s. But what I would say is that it's coming very soon. So NASA has made a promise, and it's not just NASA, it is political, it does have to do with administrations, at what funding we will go to send people, but there is a commitment with Artemis to send the first female to step foot on the moon, or the first person of color

• 43:13Speaker 05

  to step on the moon, or both, or whichever we can get to on terms of a diverse population of people. Because the only people that have stepped on the moon are 12 different men, and that's one of the commitments that's coming, and it is definitely coming in our lifetimes in the next two to three years. We will be stepping on the moon. Not Mars, thank you. Elon Musk wants to, but that does not mean that we will get there. You will die because of radiation.

• 43:40Ira Flatow?

  As I said before, I hate it when that happens. Yes, go ahead. Go ahead. I love that two young people just spoke. I'm an educator. What should I be focusing on? What do I need to teach? Ooh, to all our panelists, anybody in particular?

• 43:58Speaker 07

  Well, I'll actually go ahead and start, which is, you know, I think when it comes to climate and climate impacts, right, that I think that right now, the sooner we start teaching that, the sooner we engage the public around what does climate change mean for you?

• 44:14Ira Flatow?

  But Kevin, are the teachers equipped to teach that?

• 44:17Speaker 07

  Yes and no. So I think that the city of New York has been starting to build a little bit of curriculum around this, and have started to build sustainability programs right into some of the schools. But I think we can do more, to your point, Ira, in the sense that if you can teach geology, right, and the sciences that are also taught in elementary and middle and high school, you can also start to teach more of the climate aspects of that. But it's not just about teaching the science of it, it's teaching, you know, how do you, how can you be a part of the solution, right? What does it mean for you? How can you reduce your carbon impact? Also holding those that are having the majority of the carbon emissions accountable.

• 44:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, I would just add, teaching the scientific method.

• 44:55Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 44:56Speaker 04

  This is not an intuitive way of thinking. The intuitive way of thinking is much more lawyerly, which is, you already have your conclusion, how can I prove that? The scientific method is, you have a hypothesis, you design experiments to disprove your hypothesis, and then you continue to experiment, you repeat, you repeat, you change the conditions, and slowly over time, you build knowledge. But that is not an intuitive way of thinking, and I think a lot of students unfortunately do not come out of their educations with that kind of critical thinking skill.

• 45:29Ira Flatow?

  I think we have time for one more question from the audience. Who's got, right here? Right here.

• 45:33Flora Lichtman?

  Is there a way that all three of your fields could come together for the benefit of the future and science, and work together to, like, benefit humanity?

• 45:44Speaker 05

  I think yes.

• 45:44Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 45:45Ira Flatow?

  Wow. I always say that the youngest folks in the audience ask the most difficult questions.

• 45:51Speaker 05

  We're gonna find a planet that does not have climate change, and no disease exists, because the atmosphere has these molecules in it that destroy disease, and its atmosphere doesn't want to have climate change, so it's not gonna have it.

• 46:06Speaker 07

  Well, and to, in a slightly different approach.

• 46:11Speaker 05

  That was the comedy approach.

• 46:13Speaker 07

  You know, the majority of our observations now of the climate system actually come from space. Right? And actually, just this year was one of the advances of that, is now we can actually globally measure by NASA satellites, carbon dioxide where it is in the atmosphere and where it's going. And so I think that's a natural aspect, that as we continue to build out technology, to have higher data coming in, whether we're looking out at space, or we're looking, we're going to space and looking back at our Earth, allows us to better understand the interconnectedness of the climate system, which then, of course, connects to the impacts on humans that live there, and uses a lot of that same technology that's being used also to look out further out to space, to learn about what's out there in exoplanets and all those type of things. So, maybe that, that would be my other approach.

• 46:57Ira Flatow?

  All right, well, as we wind up and run out of time, Celine, I want to ask you, what stories are you going to be following in 2025?

• 47:04Speaker 04

  Well, I'm going to be following what's going to be happening under the new administration. We've seen a number of nominees within HHS. What will that mean for science? What will that mean for science at the NIH? What will that mean for science at the CDC? And it's not just those two agencies, which probably fund the bulk of the medical science in this country and public health science in this country, but also people's trust in science, again, will have everything to do with whether they feel like they're benefiting from that science. And so we've accessed the GLP-1 drugs, the weight loss drugs. The Biden administration just announced that Medicare will be expanding coverage, not just on the basis of having diabetes, but also obesity, period. You don't have to have another condition.

• 47:46Speaker 04

  But that rule will not be finalized until President-elect Trump is in office. Will he follow through on that? What will that mean? What will that mean for Medicare spending? What will that mean for other things that we're trying to cover people for? So, you know, I think there's a lot that remains to be seen as to how this will play out, but if people don't feel like they're benefiting from the advancements, they won't trust us.

• 48:07Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, and Jackie, what about you? What's going to be happening in astronomy, astrophysics? You mentioned the Rubin Observatory. What will that allow us to see?

• 48:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:17Ira Flatow?

  With the Rubin Observatory?

• 48:18Speaker 05

  I mentioned the Rubin Observatory. It's getting its first light as we speak. It's a ground-based telescope. It's on Earth. It's a big telescope, and it has the largest camera that we have ever built. So that's why it can see the sky every three nights. And what it opens up for us is everything is changing in the universe. Everything is changing at every second. We're going to find things like, it's going to help us with asteroids. That's a problem. I can say bad things, too. Like, the asteroids could hit us, and we will look for that. And the Rubin Observatory is well slated to detecting near-Earth hazardous asteroids. It's also very good at detecting things that blow up. Don't worry, that's fine for you all. That's not going to hurt you.

• 49:03Speaker 05

  It's just, stars are always exploding, not just in our own galaxy. We actually haven't had one in a while, and so we're kind of waiting for that to happen for us. But every galaxy's got these stars that are massive and blow up, and it is just going to showcase it for us. Look out for that. It's going to be really exciting in 2025.

• 49:19Ira Flatow?

  I can always find the dark cloud in your silver lining.

• 49:23Ira Flatow?

  What about funding for these projects? So could we expect that funding might be cut under a new administration?

• 49:29Speaker 05

  Well, that telescope I just mentioned is the largest investment in a telescope by the National Science Foundation.

• 49:35Ira Flatow?

  Funded by the US government.

• 49:36Speaker 05

  Funded by the US government, and it's funded. So it's completed, they can't take it away. But funding the science is a critical thing that needs to keep happening because, yes, that telescope can have data. The thing that we're all a little bit concerned about is funding the scientists that want to work on the data, paying for the grad students and the postdocs and the undergrads. That's a fear that while you can produce all the data that you want, but we thrive, astronomers, other fields too, we need government funding in order to do the science on the instruments that the government has paid for us to have.

• 50:15Ira Flatow?

  Let me ask my other panelists, do you find that there are enough scientists who might be coming into the government who can understand how to spend that kind of money? Celine?

• 50:24Speaker 04

  I am concerned about a brain drain right now. There are a lot of people who are really nervous about what the incoming administration will do, what it will mean for their environment in which they do research. There's also something called Schedule F of federal employees where normally there are certain civil service protections. The prior Trump administration made some of these changes to make it easier to eliminate positions. The Biden administration reversed that. The incoming administration is planning to reinstitute the Schedule F. And so that is a way of getting rid of a lot of career scientists and putting in political appointees, which we've seen at the top levels now.

• 51:06Speaker 04

  So that is very concerning, particularly when we have been the leaders in much, you know, the scientific world. You know, now you have China and others that are catching up and perhaps succeeding us in certain spaces, but it is really concerning what might happen.

• 51:20Ira Flatow?

  Well, I want to thank all of you. We have run out of time for such an eclectic discussion and a wide-ranging discussion. Thank you all for joining us.

• 51:30Ira Flatow?

  Celine Gounder, Senior Fellow and Editor-at-Large for Public Health at KFF Health News, Jackie Farady, Astrophysicist and Brown Dwarf Researcher at the American Museum of Natural History, and Kevin Reed, Chief Climate Scientist at the New York Climate Exchange, and Associate Provost for Climate and Sustainability Programming at Stony Brook University. Great job, everybody. And that's it for this hour. Thanks to all the folks who came out to join us at WNYC's Green Space and to everyone who helped put that event together.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  And that wraps up this year in science. In our next episode, my fellow Sci-Fry producers share some of their favorite science stories of the year. Lots of folks helped make the show happen, including...

• 52:16Ira Flatow?

  Charles Bergquist. Shoshana Buckspahn.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Dee Petersman. Phyllis Somers. I'm Rasha Aridi. Catch you next time.