Pod Insights Science Friday Most Powerful Neutrino Ever Is Detected In the Mediterranean | Nerdy Valentines About this episode A neutrino with a record-breaking level of energy was picked up by a detector in the Mediterranean Sea. Also, listener stories of love at first science.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:20 Flora Lichtman? This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichtman.
1:23 Ira Flatow? And I'm Ira Flatow. Some new insights into neutrinos. You know, they're sometimes called ghost particles because they are nearly weightless, rarely interact with any other matter, and have very little electric charge. Spooky stuff. Well, now adding to the intrigue, the discovery of a neutrino with a record-breaking level of energy. Yes, joining me to tell us more about that story and other science stories of the week is Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Scientist, based in New York. Welcome back, Sophie. Always good to have you.
1:58 Flora Lichtman? Thank you.
1:59 Ira Flatow? All right, start us off with the ABCs of a neutrino. What exactly is it?
2:04 Flora Lichtman? So, a neutrino is a fundamental particle, but instead of, you know, linking up with other particles to form an atom, for instance, a neutrino really, very, very rarely interacts with regular matter. And to catch a glimpse-
2:17 Speaker 03 Limps of it, researchers build these huge detectors filled with a dense substance like water, or sometimes they use ice. And the idea is, on the off chance a stray neutrino might pass through this detector, it could bump into an atom in the water or the ice, and that could make a reaction of other particles that the detector is able to pick up. So you have these really big detectors in places like Antarctica, and now one in the Mediterranean Sea, this relatively new detector, that found a very powerful neutrino. It's about 10 times more energy than the other, the previous record holder, which was found by the Antarctic detector.
2:55 Ira Flatow? Wow.
2:55 Speaker 03 It's 120 peta electron volts.
3:00 Ira Flatow? That's a lot, I'm guessing.
3:03 Speaker 03 Right, I mean, on a larger scale, it's not a ton. But when we're talking about the particle scale, that's, that's big. That is thousands of times more energetic than the particles you would get at a particle collider like the one at CERN.
3:17 Ira Flatow? All right, so what does this tell us about neutrinos that we don't already know? Or teach us about the universe or something?
3:24 Speaker 03 Yes, so the thing about a neutrino this powerful is it probably originated in a cataclysmic event somewhere out in the universe. Think two supermassive black holes merging together, some event like that. But because neutrinos interact so rarely with other matter, it probably traveled to us fairly directly from the event that spawned it, which means we can trace it back much more easily than we can trace other kinds of cosmic rays that have a stronger electric charge and so interact with other matter more. So that makes this a really cool option for us to observe the rest of the universe.
3:59 Ira Flatow? Yeah, neutrinos are really cool. Let's move on to your next story about the changing shape of the Earth's inner core? Really?
4:08 Speaker 03 That's right. So Earth is sort of like, we've got the crust on the outside, then we've got a layer called the mantle, then we've got the liquid outer core, and then the mostly solid inner core. And we know that the liquid outer core, because of convection, is always interacting with the inner core, and this can change the way the inner core rotates. But in a new study, they used seismic waves that were passing through the Earth, and they found that they changed in such a way that indicates that the inner core might not just be rotating, it could also be changing its shape.
4:40 Ira Flatow? Well, we know, right, that the inner core may have slowed down over time, and now it's changing its shape.
4:47 Speaker 03 That's right. These changes in rotation, it kind of means the inner core moves at a pace that isn't always exactly aligned with the pace that the rest of the planet is rotating. And that actually makes it pretty hard to observe because you've got to account for that rotation when you're trying to measure what else the inner core is up to. And that's what makes this finding so interesting, that they've also managed to find these signs that it could be changing shape.
5:10 Ira Flatow? Hmm. Well, maybe it has something to do with my day feeling a little bit different in time.
5:16 Speaker 03 The inner core is messing with everyone's sense of time.
5:19 Ira Flatow? Let's move on to the next story. As we've seen throughout COVID, remember wastewater surveillance has proven to be a really effective way to detect the spread of disease. And now a new study has found an even more efficient way to use this technology. Tell us about that.
5:37 Speaker 03 That's right. So if you have a wastewater detection system at one site, you know, you can monitor the the waste from humans and see what are the levels of different bacteria and viruses in these samples. So that'll tell you if, say, you know, COVID is going up in one place. But what if you wanted to create sort of a a worldwide monitoring network to give you a heads up when an outbreak isn't just happening in one place, but it's creating a larger issue, like possibly even a future pandemic? You would think you might have to have monitoring sites at thousands of places around the world. But it turns out, if you have just 20 airports all around the world, that's enough to create a global
6:21 Speaker 03 monitoring system that can give you a heads up about disease outbreaks.
6:24 Ira Flatow? Wow. And that would be a good place to put the monitoring devices, right?
6:28 Speaker 03 Yes, exactly. So when you fly on a plane, humans produce waste, the plane stores that waste. And then when you get to the airport, a truck comes and empties it off the plane. So that means that airports are getting these samples of humans from all over the place. And that makes it a really good place to take samples like this.
6:44 Ira Flatow? You know, with with the US withdrawing from the World Health Organization, I wonder if we would even be part of something like that.
6:50 Speaker 03 That is the problem with withdrawing from global organizations like this. I mean, as we all learned from COVID, disease outbreaks don't respect borders. And so in order to prepare for them, you really can't just be focusing surveillance on one country or one location. It's got to be a much bigger look.
7:07 Ira Flatow? Yeah, let's stay with air travel for a bit longer because there's an experimental aircraft, the XB1, created by the company Boom Supersonic. It hits supersonic speed, but without creating a sonic boom when it broke the sound barrier. Tell us about that.
7:24 Speaker 03 Yeah, Boom Supersonic might need to change its name. So this aircraft took advantage of a phenomenon known as the Mach cutoff. Basically, when you're at different altitudes, the speed of sound is actually different. It moves more slowly when you're at a higher altitude. And if you're at just the right altitude and the aircraft breaks the sound barrier by just the right amount, the sonic boom is going to travel away from the aircraft in all directions. But as it goes downward, the speed of sound changes, and those changes actually deflect the sonic boom. So it still creates a boom, but that boom cannot reach the ground, which means you don't get any of those effects like very loud disruptive sound or breaking glass or shaking buildings on the ground.
8:08 Ira Flatow? How soon might we see something like this in production?
8:12 Speaker 03 Well, Boom Supersonic wants to use what it learned from its experimental aircraft and put that on a commercial airliner that it is planning to start testing in a few years. And they say that this could travel overland, so it could do, for instance, a flight from New York to Los Angeles without bothering the people in the ground below. And that would shorten that trip, for instance, by about 90 minutes.
8:34 Ira Flatow? Let's stay up in the sky a minute because there's this story that's been circulating about a big asteroid heading toward us with a pretty high collision risk. Is that true? Fill us in on that.
8:47 Speaker 03 That is true. This asteroid has the not great name of 2024 YR4, and it has a 1 in 43 chance of hitting the Earth in 2032. So that's not like a super high chance, but it's much higher than I'm really comfortable with. And so the reason that it's still uncertain, though, is because we're basing those odds on on data that's, you know, incomplete. Their errors can work their way in, so we really don't know what the final odds will be until this thing gets a little bit closer. But already, that's, that number is high enough and the asteroid is large enough that international bodies are starting to prepare for what can we do if it does
9:32 Speaker 03 turn out that this is headed towards Earth? So for example, NASA, a couple of years ago, did a test where they deflected an asteroid. They got it to change its trajectory slightly. And so that's the kind of, you know, mission that maybe will be necessary.
9:47 Ira Flatow? This is not an Earth destroying asteroid like the dinosaurs.
9:50 Speaker 03 That's right, or you could also compare it to the Chelyabinsk meteor, which hit Russia in 2013. That was about 20 meters across. This one is going to be about twice that size or more. Again, there's a lot of uncertainty. If it were to hit Earth, it would absolutely cause damage, but it wouldn't be an extinction level asteroid like the one that knocked the dinosaurs out.
10:11 Ira Flatow? Right. Let's stay in space just a little bit longer to talk about scientists discovering the largest object in the universe.
10:20 Speaker 03 Yes.
10:21 Ira Flatow? Wow, what is, what is it?
10:22 Speaker 03 It is called the Kipu superstructure, and it is 1.4 billion with a B, light years long, and hundreds of thousands of times more massive than just a single galaxy. So sometimes galaxies clump together in space into these clusters, and then sometimes galaxy clusters clump together into what are called superclusters. And so some of these superclusters have previously been considered the the largest objects in the universe, but the Kipu superstructure is is the biggest found so far.
10:55 Ira Flatow? Just as they used to ask Johnny Carson, just how big is it?
10:59 Speaker 03 So it's got about 70 superclusters, all contained within this larger supercluster. And if you wanted to start at one end and travel to the other, even if you were moving at light speed, it would take you 1.4 billion years to traverse the whole thing.
11:16 Ira Flatow? Wow. Wow, that is pretty big. All right, let's, let's close on a delightful story about, of all things, dancing turtles, Sophie. Why are the turtles dancing?
11:28 Speaker 03 The turtles are dancing, and I would encourage everyone to look up a video of this because they're super cute when they dance. The turtles are dancing because they're about to get fed. And so they're waggling their fins, their front fins, and they're, and they're sometimes spinning in circles and they're opening their mouths. But the way that they know they're going to get fed is what's interesting here. So we know that turtles are really good at navigating through the ocean, and we think that they do so by detecting magnetic fields. And to learn more about that, researchers trained captive turtles that when they were in a certain kind of magnetic field, they would be fed. And just the turtles learned this so well that they started doing their anticipatory food dance as soon as they got to that magnetic field.
12:10 Ira Flatow? So we, we learn a little bit more about how turtles navigate using magnetic fields, then?
12:15 Speaker 03 That's right. So for instance, they created a magnetic field that reproduces the field found in one of the migration areas for loggerhead turtles. And so they wanted to see if the turtles would turn in this magnetic field the same way that they turn when they're out in the ocean. And they did. And they also figured out by testing different kinds of magnetic fields and how the turtles responded to them, they, they think now that there are two different ways that turtles sense magnetic fields. They use one sense to sort of locate themselves on a map of the ocean or an internal idea of where they are. And the other one, they use to tell them which direction to go once they get to that place.
12:56 Ira Flatow? Well, there you have it. Always great stuff, Sophie. Thank you for enlightening our day today.
13:02 Speaker 03 Thank you.
13:02 Ira Flatow? Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Scientist, based in New York. If you want to see those dancing turtles, we, we've got a link for you, a video of the dancing turtles up on our website, sciencefriday.com.
13:18 Ira Flatow? After the break, we're celebrating Valentine's Day the Sci-Fry Way by listening to some of your nerdiest meet-cutes. Stick around.
13:32 Speaker 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
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15:05 Speaker 04 And from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, working to enhance public understanding of science, technology, and economics in the modern world.
15:17 Ira Flatow? Last week, we asked you for your nerdy Valentine stories, and boy, did you deliver.
15:25 Speaker 05 Our first conversation was about high-altitude cerebral edema, which made him find me irresistible.
15:33 Ira Flatow? My nerdy love story goes back to dissecting fetal pigs.
15:38 Speaker 05 I locked eyes with stars aligned, astronomy was going in my head. I had to know her.
15:49 Flora Lichtman? We heard about flirting over raw sewage.
15:52 Speaker 05 He was so excited about a wastewater treatment plant, and that is when I knew that he was my person.
15:59 Flora Lichtman? Bonding over medical mysteries.
16:01 Speaker 06 She kindly processed the photomicrographs of the surgical specimen. That was 41 years ago, and we owe it all to gout.
16:12 Flora Lichtman? To steamy moments in the lab. She accidentally lit the beaker on fire, so that's how we met.
16:20 Ira Flatow? I love you, Kate.
16:23 Ira Flatow? You all had wonderful stories to share, and there's one more we wanted you to hear.
16:30 Ira Flatow? Ed, are you there?
16:32 Speaker 05 Hey, good morning.
16:33 Flora Lichtman? Okay, Ed, set the scene. Where does this love story begin?
16:37 Speaker 05 Well, in the summer of 1962, I was going into my junior year at the Rinsele Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. And I needed to pick up some organic chemistry credits since I had decided to change my major from engineering to pre-med. During the same period of time, my father moved the family from Brooklyn to Knoxville. And so they put some pressure on me. To come home and attend summer school at University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
17:15 Speaker 05 On the first day of class, we were assigned seats and this gorgeous, tall blonde with an unintelligible West Tennessee twang sat down next to me. So I fumbled out a greeting in her direction as this gal was totally out of my league. Much to my pleasant surprise, we were assigned lab partners on the following day. As I was constructing the Tower of Erlenmeyer flasks for our first experiment, my partner made a sudden move with her textbook and smashed the entire setup into a hundred small pieces.
17:57 Flora Lichtman? That sounds dangerous, Ed.
17:58 Speaker 05 Well, it was. Needless to say, I was dumbfounded and staggered.
18:02 Ira Flatow? Well, did you think this was, might have been on purpose, Ed, to meet you?
18:07 Speaker 05 Ah, I'd like to think that, but at the moment, she apologized and the good news for that was we were talking. And we're still talking 65 years later. And since our 50th anniversary, we've had an Erlenmeyer flask sitting over the fireplace at the house.
18:28 Ira Flatow? A special one that you had made?
18:30 Speaker 05 She did, yes. Yes, a gold-plated Erlenmeyer flask.
18:34 Ira Flatow? Wow. A boy from Brooklyn getting into big time over his head and it all turned out okay.
18:40 Speaker 05 Yes, I spent most of my life getting in over my head and somehow finding a way of making some good out of it, yeah.
18:48 Flora Lichtman? Ed, what's your wife's name?
18:50 Speaker 05 Laura Jean.
18:51 Flora Lichtman? Laura Jean.
18:53 Ira Flatow? Do you think this was just a coincidence, all this happened, Ed?
18:56 Speaker 05 Everything happens for a reason, they say.
18:59 Ira Flatow? What advice would you give other people who are living and working alongside their colleagues in labs today about Valentine's Day?
19:07 Speaker 05 Well, I would say it ain't over till it's over and go for it.
19:13 Flora Lichtman? Ed, Happy Valentine's Day to you and Laura Jean.
19:16 Speaker 05 Thank you.
19:17 Ira Flatow? Thank you for calling us and thanks to everybody who participated.
19:22 Flora Lichtman? Yes, it was a real bright spot of the week, listening to your stories. And you can read more nerdy love stories on our website at sciencefriday.com/love. That's sciencefriday.com/love.
19:38 Ira Flatow? That's about all the time we have for now. A lot of people helped make this show happen. George Harper. John Dankoski. Annie Nero. Jason Rosenberg. I'm Ira Flatow. Thanks for listening.
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