The Science Behind Hurricane Milton

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. A bit later in the hour, a look at the myth of climate havens, plus, the science of super agers, why some people live past 95 while remaining cognitively sharp and in good shape. But first, so many folks saw the aurora last night. It may be back tonight if you missed it. And while you are outside, you might get a bonus. A look at a comet, Comet Tsuchinshan Atlas, visible to the naked eye, low in the Western sky at sunset.

It’s going to be hard to see so low on the horizon, but viewing will get better over the next few weeks as it rises higher. See it soon or you’ll have to wait 80,000 years. So I’m going to have a look. Here with other news of the week is Maggie Koerth, science writer based in Minneapolis. Maggie, welcome back. Did you get to see the aurora last night?

MAGGIE KOERTH: I did a little bit. We drove about an hour north of the Twin Cities and saw some really great like silver streaks and this pulsing silver colored stripe in the sky. And then my children were very responsible and told me it was a school night and they needed to go to bed.

IRA FLATOW: There you go. All right. Let’s move on to some of the analysis of Hurricane Milton following that disastrous path through Florida. The hurricane was expected to cause a big wet 15 foot storm surge?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah, and they got really lucky because Milton was down to a category 3 by the time it made landfall. Florida got hit with tornadoes. They got rain flooding. They got high winds. But that 15 foot storm surge didn’t happen.

Instead, oceans rose between 5 and 10 feet in Siesta Key, while up towards the north of that, the hurricane’s counterclockwise winds were pushing water out of Tampa Bay and temporarily exposed the entire ocean floor.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. That’s sort of a reverse storm surge.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yes, that is exactly is a reverse storm surge because of the way that hurricanes, they move in that circle. So some part, they’re pushing water into land. And in another area, they’re pushing water away from the land.

IRA FLATOW: That sounds like what happens in a tsunami. First, the water goes away.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yep.

IRA FLATOW: And then it comes back.

MAGGIE KOERTH: But it did not seem to come back in the tsunami kind of way. It was back to normal yesterday.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Yeah. We’ve talked about how climate change can make storms more intense. But do we know how much of this is attributed to climate change versus other factors?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah, well, there have actually been two reports that came out this past week tied to Helene and Milton and kind of trying to make those evaluations. The first one was from the World Weather Attribution Initiative, which is an international team of scientists. And they do rapid studies aimed at figuring out whether and how climate change contributed to these immediate weather disasters. And so their analysis found that these significantly warmer than average water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were really help fueling hurricane Helene specifically and increased the likelihood of heavy rains in Appalachia by as much as 70%.

And then the second one was from Climate Central, which is a nonprofit news and science organization. And they were also looking at those increased water temperatures in the Gulf. Climate change made those increased temperatures hundreds of times more likely than they otherwise would have been, according to that report. And we know that hotter surface water is behind that big increase in power that we saw in Hurricane Milton this week, when it was briefly one of the most powerful hurricanes ever recorded.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. Wow. There is evidence for that. OK, Maggie, this week was Nobel Prize week of the three science awards, I’m going to ask you, which one were you most excited about?

MAGGIE KOERTH: I was most excited about the chemistry award, which is all about protein folding. That one went to David Baker from the University of Washington and then also to two researchers from Google DeepMind in London, Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper. So proteins are these chains of amino acids. They twist and fold on themselves. They are the doers of chemical life.

They control everything from hormones to the movement and function of neurotransmitters to growth and repair of tissues. And the way that they fold up affects what their function is. And so Baker and his team have been studying protein folding and using different ways of computer modeling to understand how it works for more than 20 years.

And this is where it gets exciting to me, because you might remember, Ira, a couple of times when you have interacted with some of Dr. Baker’s work and maybe not realized it was the same guy that just won the Nobel, if you think back to 2005, there was a program called Rosetta at Home, which was a volunteer computing project that linked up thousands of people’s sleeping computers–

IRA FLATOW: Oh, yeah

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yep. To make one kind of mega computer that could process huge amounts of data and predict and design proteins. That was the Baker Lab. And in 2008, Foldit came out, which is this online puzzle game that puts out hundreds of thousands of human brains to the problem of protein structure. And that was also the Baker Lab. And I was really excited about that because it was really cool to have this, hey, I know that guy feeling, even though I don’t actually know that guy. But it was great.

IRA FLATOW: That’s great. Let’s move on to news about a problem. For a decade, we’ve been following this story. President Biden announced a new rule that would replace lead pipes, right?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yes. And this is such a big deal 10 years ago, the citizens of Flint, Michigan, learned that poorly treated water was corroding lead pipes in their town. It was leaching this toxic metal into the water supply. And now the federal government is taking steps to make sure that something like that doesn’t happen again. So over the next 10 years, most utilities are going to be required to assess where lead pipes are in their systems and replace those pipes with something else.

IRA FLATOW: Would this cover everybody’s?

MAGGIE KOERTH: No, not exactly. So this is only going to cover the utility-owned pipes. So if you have lead pipes in your house or on your property, that’s going to be the responsibility of you or your landlord.

IRA FLATOW: Ouch. That’s going to cost some money.

MAGGIE KOERTH: And that’s going to impact low income families the most, right? In addition, there are some utilities, such as those in Chicago, which is the city with the nation’s largest lead pipe concentration, those utilities are going to get longer than 10 years to make changes because there’s just so much lead pipe in their system.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, longer. Well, we hope all that happens. And in other news, former President Trump has been pushing eugenics ideas lately.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah.

IRA FLATOW: This is scary.

MAGGIE KOERTH: This is. But I think it’s an important thing to call out for what it is. Trump has been in a couple of podcast interviews and in his speeches talking about this idea that immigrants and murderers have bad genes. And eugenics is this pseudoscience that claims some people are just born to be poor or born to be criminals because of traits they inherited from their parents or their grandparents. And likewise that the wealthy and powerful are genetically predisposed to their positions as well.

And these are ideas that had a lot of power in the early 20th century in the United States. They formed the basis of really horrible programs where the government was sterilizing Americans against their will, and they contributed to policies here that blocked immigration from certain regions, certain countries. They contributed to policies that marked some Americans as not worth educating or helping.

And these are, let’s just say it, these are racist ideas. And they lead to morally reprehensible outcomes. And they’re also scientifically incorrect. People are not cows. Intelligence, let alone the concept of lawbreaking, it does not work like hair color.

And if you want to know more about that, there is a really good book a couple of years ago that was written by a geneticist, Adam Rutherford, and it’s called Control, The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics. I really recommend reading it.

IRA FLATOW: Long held belief of the Third Reich also.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Also, yep, contributed to that as well.

IRA FLATOW: Maggie, we got to ditch some of this bad news for a while. Let’s head out for a trip to space. The European Space Agency recently launched a mission called Hera to revisit an old friend. Tell us about that.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah so two years ago, we did some real action movie stuff. We sent DART, the Double Asteroid Redirect mission out to sort of bonk into an asteroid and see if we could successfully alter its course. And now we have this other spacecraft called Hera.

So Hera successfully launched this week. It’s accompanied by a couple of CubeSats, and they’re going out to the asteroid Dimorphos. They’re going to look at the size and shape of the crater that DART left and whether DART has also affected the little moon that goes around Dimorphos. And those CubeSats are going to study the surface of the asteroid and its gravity and help refine data and the models for future missions.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Yeah. Now here’s an item that’s surely going to be the talk around the dinner table. How can you figure out if an elephant is left or right handed, Maggie? How do you do that? Because it’s very important to me.

MAGGIE KOERTH: I can’t tell you how long I spent trying to come up with a punchline to this joke. That is obviously a joke, but I don’t know what it is. I failed. I’m so sorry.

IRA FLATOW: An elephant walks into a bar.

MAGGIE KOERTH: I know. Right?

IRA FLATOW: I know.

MAGGIE KOERTH: OK, so elephant handedness is actually about the direction that their trunks bend. When they’re picking up objects, they can kind of curl a little to the left or a little to the right. And researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany found that over time, the elephants will kind of scuff the trunk hairs off the outside of the curl and they’ll get more wrinkles on the skin on the inside of it. And those two signals will tell you which direction an individual elephant tends to bend.

IRA FLATOW: Why do we care. I mean, whose idea was it. Hey, sitting around, let’s find out if an elephant is left handed or not?

MAGGIE KOERTH: It’s because they’re mechanical engineers and they are really into this idea of designing soft, bendy, flexible robots based on animal biology. And elephant trunks are these really cool things. These systems are boneless tubes containing tens of thousands of muscles that can change shape. And so this study was looking at trunk skin and how it helps with that and is affected by all that movement.

IRA FLATOW: All right. That’s great. Maggie, finally, something that only may top that, scientists have found the head of a giant, and I mean, giant, ancient millipede.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yes. So in 1854, scientists discovered fossils of the world’s largest arthropod. This is a millipede the size of a king size bed.

IRA FLATOW: Wait a minute.

MAGGIE KOERTH: It’s a real big millipede. But for hundreds years, nobody had seen the head, like all the fossils were headless. And now that has changed, because two newly discovered fossils are showing us the face of this absolutely horrific beastie. It also turns out to be kind of a transitional species.

So this is a millipede whose head turns out to look a lot more like that of a centipede. But it was also walking around with its eyes on stalks, kind of like a crab.

IRA FLATOW: This is great. Thank you, Maggie. You always bring us good stuff.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Thank you so much. I love being here.

IRA FLATOW: You’re welcome. Maggie Koerth, science writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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