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

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow with WNYC from the Green Space in New York City.

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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 fields, 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 and editor at large for Public Health at KFF Health News. Welcome back to the show. Dr. Jackie Faherty, an astrophysicist at the famous American Museum of Natural History, just up the road apiece, 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.

KEVIN REED: Thanks for having me.

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

CELINE GOUNDER: 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 a mix.

And then you go down to people under 40, again, 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 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.

IRA FLATOW: In what way?

CELINE GOUNDER: 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 achieve equity and the progress we want if you’re leaving men behind. And so Richard Reeves, I would highly recommend his book, Of Boys and Men. But some of the recommendations he has with respect to education is to actually redshirt 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.

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

JACKIE FAHERTY: Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and take us off of Earth right now–

IRA FLATOW: I’m ready.

JACKIE FAHERTY: –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 top stories–

IRA FLATOW: Top stories.

JACKIE FAHERTY: –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 is 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 going to highlight for you is actually one that I led. And I think it represents one of these things where you can look up and you get a 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 going to 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. 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. And 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 that’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 theorized because we can’t know for sure for sure. 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. It’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 I/O. I/O is volcanic. It spews out a plasma. It gets trapped with Jupiter. The object that we discovered, this phenomenon happening is isolated. It 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.

IRA FLATOW: What was the object? Do we know what it was?

JACKIE FAHERTY: 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 Worlds colon Planet Nine. 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.

IRA FLATOW: Is it a brown dwarf?

JACKIE FAHERTY: Yes. Yes. Sorry, Ira. Yes.

IRA FLATOW: I was trying to get you to say that.

JACKIE FAHERTY: 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. It doesn’t have enough mass for hydrogen fusion in it, so it’s just cooling for its life.

IRA FLATOW: So that’s what the surprising part of it is that it’s glowing instead of–

JACKIE FAHERTY: 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. 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.

IRA FLATOW: Tell us about Dan Castleden and Backyard Worlds. Is that part–

JACKIE FAHERTY: Yeah, so Dan Castleden is the citizen scientist that worked with us that discovered the object. And he discovered it honestly– so Backyard Worlds colon 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 and machine learning. And we do that as well. But actually, the human eye, believe it or not, is phenomenal at this. It’s really good at pattern recognition. And 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– I led a James Webb Space Telescope proposal. Dan is a member of our James Webb team.

IRA FLATOW: Wow.

JACKIE FAHERTY: Yeah. You could also be on a James Webb proposal.

IRA 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?

JACKIE FAHERTY: So the fact that it’s there really opens the doors. We didn’t realize we could look for this before. 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 enough signal in there. I didn’t know it was going to happen. Do you know what I’m saying? Sometimes you need to see it so that then the next round, we can prioritize 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.

IRA FLATOW: Well, you’ll come back and tell us more when you do find anything.

JACKIE FAHERTY: 100%.

IRA FLATOW: OK. We need to take a break. But we’ll be back with more from our year end review celebration held earlier this month at WNYC’s Green Space in New York. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. If you’re just joining us, it’s our year in review event held earlier this month at WNYC’s Green Space in New York City with public health expert, Celine Gounder, astrophysicist, Jackie Faherty, and climate scientist, Kevin Reed. I asked Dr. Reed for his thoughts on the biggest news in climate this year.

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?

KEVIN REED: 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? 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. 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. 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, 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, water rushing down the stairs.

And this is really, again, a telltale sign that climate change is here and it’s 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 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.

And so these are people’s livelihoods and cultures that are changing. 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.

IRA FLATOW: Please.

KEVIN REED: 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. So there’s been a study earlier this year that actually showed that some parts of coral reefs might be a little bit more resilient. 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.

IRA FLATOW: That is some good news.

KEVIN REED: 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 impact both by fertilizer, but also by climate change.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, we actually did a story on that.

KEVIN REED: 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 by 2035.

So that’s almost 100 times increase in what we’ll get in that clean energy.

IRA FLATOW: This is becoming cheaper and cheaper, isn’t it? It’s not just trying to become greener, but it’s also economically–

KEVIN REED: Yeah.

IRA FLATOW: –the right way to go.

KEVIN REED: 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.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. And how do you think the change in administration, the new Trump administration, will affect these climate change mitigation efforts?

KEVIN REED: So we’re sticking with the good news, right? Look, I just talked a little bit about that, the momentum, 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, 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 in the next four years, so that’s an important thing to note, that administrations come and go and that climate change is a local challenge. 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’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.

IRA FLATOW: But we’ve heard and we’ve seen some talk and action also about returning to nuclear power. I’m seeing 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?

KEVIN REED: So let’s start with the basics. 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 is 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 a nuclear power plant. They’re actually quicker. You can build them sooner. The typical timeline is at least six years for even the 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, which is a cost, which also has sustainability efforts in the long run. And I want to actually take this opportunity to talk about another good 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. 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 think. 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.

IRA FLATOW: Celine, 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 US. Should we– something to worry about?

CELINE GOUNDER: Well, we’re coming up on five years since COVID, right? Have we learned the lessons?

IRA FLATOW: Uh-oh.

CELINE GOUNDER: 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 that piece. 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. There are 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 a situation where you’re more likely to see the virus evolve to better infect humans.

In fact, in the Journal of Science was reported that researchers have found that a single mutation, a switch in a receptor called the sialic acid receptor going from 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.

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.

IRA FLATOW: What’s the lesson we didn’t learn that you were hinting at from COVID?

CELINE GOUNDER: Remember too much testing?

IRA FLATOW: We should be doing more–

CELINE GOUNDER: We should be doing a lot of testing. That is how you have 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 farm workers, so if a farm worker on a farm tests positive, that means the cattle or poultry probably have it too. The farm workers 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 health care providers. They just want to stay under the radar. 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.

IRA 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 has been very busy this year. You talked about this brown dwarf. But what about this exoplanet that you discovered, really cold?

JACKIE FAHERTY: Yeah, really cold.

IRA FLATOW: How cold is it?

JACKIE FAHERTY: How cold is it? Well, I’m going to 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. 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. I’m 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. 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 Indie. 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. OK, I will 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 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?

IRA FLATOW: I’m ready.

JACKIE FAHERTY: 280 degrees Kelvin, which is–

IRA FLATOW: That’s pretty chilly.

JACKIE FAHERTY: 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 just think of it it’s like a cold day at the North Pole. 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.

IRA FLATOW: Wow.

JACKIE FAHERTY: But we saw it.

IRA FLATOW: So it’s giving off some amount of heat that you can detect it.

JACKIE FAHERTY: 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.

IRA FLATOW: That is amazing.

JACKIE FAHERTY: It’s good. It’s a good result.

IRA FLATOW: It’s good. Yeah, I love talking about all this kind of stuff. So I want to talk to Kevin a little bit because we talked 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 is AI impacting our discussion of it, our use of it?

KEVIN REED: Yeah, well, it’s evolving fast. There was a report that came out in the Journal of Nature from Google that they’ve developed a new AI tool that can forecast the weather out to 15 days. So your favorite weather app that can go out to 15 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. 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 first at a global level.

But we live right here. Our home is at a specific address in a certain part. And we’re often curious about, well, will my house flood?

IRA FLATOW: Hyper local.

KEVIN REED: Yes, hyper local. Yeah, whatever that means. And AI offers the potential to run through that gamut of models that gets you from a climate model, which is very large scale 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 allows us to actually take climate information and get it at that quote unquote, “hyper local” level.

And I think 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, as we build new data centers for AI applications, it actually can increase the amount of carbon dioxide that’s emitted into the atmosphere. Of course, as our grid becomes more renewable, 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 if we haven’t talked about it before, once carbon dioxide is up in the atmosphere, it stays up there for a couple hundred years.

IRA FLATOW: A couple hundred years.

KEVIN REED: And so it’s important that we start to think about that when we start to scale up these applications for climate.

IRA 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. This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow.

In case you’re just joining us, it’s our year in review event held earlier this month at WNYC’s Green Space in New York, with astrophysicist Jackie Faherty, climate scientist Kevin Reed, and public health expert Celine Gounder. We were talking about the effects of AI on the panelists’ fields.

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

CELINE GOUNDER: 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 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 health care 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 amazing new advancements that could potentially feed into AI systems, like what we call metagenomics, 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, which 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 sets, that will limit what the impact can be.

IRA 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?

CELINE GOUNDER: So 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 in climate change, air quality, water quality are some other ones, heat waves and the impact on health. 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 depoliticize some of these things that really should not be political issues?

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

JACKIE FAHERTY: Yeah, I think one of the things that’s happening in astronomy is 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 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 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. 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.

IRA FLATOW: All right, let’s go to the audience. Who’s got the microphone? And let’s begin right over here.

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

JACKIE FAHERTY: I wasn’t a downer.

AUDIENCE: I know.

JACKIE FAHERTY: I got misinterpreted. But go ahead.

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

JACKIE FAHERTY: 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. But in the next, next year, there’s a telescope coming online. It’s called Reuben 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. 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.

IRA FLATOW: That is really cool. OK, another question. Yes, over here.

AUDIENCE: First, which do you think is worse, 1918 flu or fully adapted bird flu?

CELINE GOUNDER: It’s very difficult to be making those comparisons. When we’ve seen H5N1 overseas, it’s had a 30% to 50% case fatality rate. COVID ended up having a less than 1% case fatality rate. And we 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, with the exception of that one case in Canada, in British Columbia.

Right now we’re crossing our fingers that it stays that way. But crossing your fingers is not a really good plan.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Next question over there.

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

IRA FLATOW: Jackie?

JACKIE FAHERTY: 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. 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 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. That’s it.

IRA FLATOW: As I said before, I hate it when that happens. Yes, go ahead. Go ahead.

AUDIENCE: I love that two young people just spoke. I’m an educator. What should I be focusing on? What do I need to teach?

IRA FLATOW: To all our panelists, anybody in particular?

KEVIN REED: I’ll actually go ahead and start, which is I think when it comes to climate and climate impacts, 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?

IRA FLATOW: But, Kevin, are the teachers equipped to teach that?

KEVIN REED: 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 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, how can you be a part of the solution? What does it mean for you? How can you reduce your carbon impact, but while also holding those that are having the majority of the carbon emissions accountable?

CELINE GOUNDER: Yeah, I would just add teaching the scientific method. This is not an intuitive way of thinking. The intuitive way of thinking is much more lawyerly, which is 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.

IRA FLATOW: I think we have time for one more question from the audience. Who’s got– right here. Right here.

AUDIENCE: 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 benefit humanity?

JACKIE FAHERTY: I think yes.

KEVIN REED: Yeah.

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

JACKIE FAHERTY: We’re going to 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 going to have it.

KEVIN REED: Well, in a slightly different approach–

JACKIE FAHERTY: That was the comedy approach.

KEVIN REED: –the majority of our observations now of the climate system actually come from space. 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 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 and exoplanets and all those type of things. So that would be my other approach.

IRA 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?

CELINE GOUNDER: 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 access to 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. 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 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.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, and Jackie, what about you? What’s going to be happening in astronomy and astrophysics? You mentioned that the Rubin Observatory. What will that allow us to see with the new observatory?

JACKIE FAHERTY: 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. 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.

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 has 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.

IRA FLATOW: I can always find a dark cloud in your silver lining. What about funding for these projects? So could we expect that funding might be cut under a new administration?

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

IRA FLATOW: Funded by the US government.

JACKIE FAHERTY: 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. But 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.

IRA 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?

CELINE GOUNDER: 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 this 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. So that is very concerning, particularly when we have been the leaders in the scientific world. Now you have China and others that are catching up and perhaps exceeding us in certain spaces. But it is really concerning what might happen.

IRA 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. Celine Gounder, senior fellow and editor at large for public health at KFF Health News, Jackie Faherty, 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.

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