Galaxies ‘Dance’ In Stunning New JWST Image

KATHLEEN DAVIS: But first, the James Webb Space telescope, the most powerful telescope in history, has been successfully operating in space for two years now. Since its launch, the telescope has dazzled astronomers and the public with stunning visuals and new kinds of scientific data about our universe.

And on its two-year anniversary, the telescope continues to return. Impressive pictures. NASA released a mesmerizing image today of two intermingling galaxies, nicknamed the penguin and the egg.

Here to tell us about that and other top stories in science this week is my guest, Jason Dinh, climate editor at Atmos. He is based in Washington, DC. Jason, welcome back.

JASON DINH: Thanks for having me.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So happy second birthday to the JWST. Jason, what was in this new image?

JASON DINH: Yeah, so this image shows two galaxies that have been interacting with each other for 25 to 75 million years, and they’re now connected by this haze of stars and gas. As you mentioned, they’re called the penguin and the egg. It turns out the penguin used to be a spiral of arms, but that’s kind of unwound. So now it kind of has the shape of a beak and a head and a tail, so it resembles its namesake a little bit.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: OK, it also sounds we’re talking about Batman villains here, but I’m sure that’s not what we’re talking about. And I hear that the telescope also has some new information on a far-off ocean.

JASON DINH: Yes, so there was a new study that just came out using the James Webb Telescope which focused on an exoplanet named LHS 1140 b. It suggests that this planet might have a liquid ocean that’s about half the size of our Atlantic Ocean, and it might even have a nitrogen atmosphere like we have on Earth, both of which would be pretty huge discoveries in our search for extraterrestrial life.

So this planet is about 48 light years away from Earth, and it orbits its star in what’s called the habitable zone, or sometimes called the Goldilocks zone, where it’s just the right temperature to host liquid water. The authors actually say it’s the first time scientists have detected signs of an atmosphere on a rocky exoplanet in a Goldilocks zone, and they go as far as saying that this is possibly our best bet at finding water beyond our solar system.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: OK, very cool.

So our next story is also sort of about space. There was a group of volunteers who lived in a NASA-created Mars replica habitat for over a year, and it sounds like they just left, right?

JASON DINH: Yeah, they just emerged. So these four volunteer crew members included an engineer, a doctor, a biomedical scientist, and a microbiologist. And they were living in this facility meant to simulate life on a settlement in Mars. And last Saturday at 5:00 PM, they emerged.

It’s a 1,700-square-foot facility called Mars Dune Alpha at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. It was actually 3D printed using the technology that they think they’ll have to use to build settlements when they’re actually out in space or on Mars.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Wow.

JASON DINH: Yeah, you can find videos of this on NASA’s website, and I think it’s kind of fun to watch. They kind look like big soft-serve ice-cream machines that are laying down the layers for the walls and floors of this building.

And the goal of all of this was to figure out how to feed and communicate with a future settlement on Mars, how to deal with risks like isolation and confinement, and how all of that affects human health.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Yeah, I mean, I’ve got to say, it seems like this would be as much of a psychological challenge as a scientific one, but it seems like these scientists fared all right, it sounds like.

JASON DINH: Yeah, definitely. It was both psychological and scientific. So most of what they were actually doing was nutrition studies on this trip. So they grew and harvested their own food. They maintained a strict meal plan, and they dealt with these programmed resource limitations. And they also kind of practiced some fake missions that they might do on Mars, like operating robots.

But the volunteers made it out totally OK. They seemed in high spirits when they got out of there. And they’re actually not done yet, so they have about two weeks of postmission data collection before they’re actually allowed to go home.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Wow. OK. Let’s move on to our next story here, which is very timely considering lots of parts of the US experienced flooding this week. FEMA has some new rules around climate change and flooding. Jason, what are these new rules?

JASON DINH: Yeah, so Grist really did some great reporting on this. They come from the Biden administration, which they finalized in an executive order, and they’re going to go into effect in September.

Essentially, the new rules ensure that FEMA, which is the government agency that rebuilds things like schools and hospitals after natural disasters, take into account future climate change when they’re rebuilding. So in the past, they had to build out of what’s called the 100-year floodplain, which is land that has a 1% risk of flooding in any given year. That system relies on history to estimate risk. But as climate change is strengthening storm surges, that kind of backward-looking approach is really systematically underestimating how dangerous any given area is.

So now with these new rules, FEMA has to take into account future sea-level rise and coastal erosion when they’re placing down new buildings. In areas where that’s hard to predict, they actually have to play it safe and build beyond the 500-year flood plain rather than the 100-year flood plain of the past.

And financially speaking, this is a pretty big deal because by the end of the decade, flood damage is expected to cost $40 billion per year and double every decade after that.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Wow. Yeah, that seems hugely important. And Houston has actually implemented some of these standards, and they’ve had them for a while, right?

JASON DINH: Yeah, so after Hurricane Harvey in 2017, Houston prohibited construction in the 500-year floodplain, and now scientists actually think that that rule prevented thousands of homes from being flooded last week when Hurricane Beryl made landfall.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: OK, so let’s move on to our next story. We have some new microbiome news this week. There was a recent study done on children with autism, and it turns out that their gut flora are unique. Tell me about this.

JASON DINH: Yeah, so the scientists are really excited about this study because it might be a way to more objectively diagnose autism. So right now to diagnose a child with autism, you usually start with a parent describing their behavior, professional observation, and some questionnaires. And as you can imagine, there’s a lot of human error baked into that assessment. It’s also really challenging to diagnose young children before they turn four.

So now there’s this new study that suggests it might be possible to diagnose children more objectively and earlier in their lives by using their gut microbiome. So the team analyzed over 1,600 stool samples from kids anywhere from 1 to 13, and they looked at the bacteria, fungi, archaea, and viruses, and then they used machine learning to detect these 31 signatures in that data set that were correlated with autism. They built a model using those 31 traits, and then they tested it on a totally new set of stool samples, and they wanted to know if that model could predict whether those new donors had autism or not. And it turns out it did so successfully almost all of the time.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: OK, let us move on to our next story. We haven’t heard updates about the bird-flu virus in a little bit, which has infected chickens, cows, and a handful of people lately. But there’s a controversial new study that takes a look at how well it’s adapted for humans. Tell us about this.

JASON DINH: This study is quite controversial. So it really depends on who you ask here. So as you mentioned, the bird flu has been found in dairy cows in about 12 states, and there’s growing concern that it could adapt to humans.

And this new study in Nature, these researchers wanted to know if that current strain of bird flu could bind to the receptors that they might encounter in a human’s respiratory tract, which would be a pretty big risk factor for species spillover. So they synthesized the building blocks for that human receptor, and then they lined plastic plates with them, and then they doused those receptors in H5N1, and they measured how much of the virus stuck. And in this study, they found that the virus did bind to those human receptors.

This stirred up quite a bit of debate because there’s actually another team that’s doing a very similar study right now but isn’t published yet, and what they’re saying is that they found that this current viral strain is actually quite bad at binding to the human receptor, according to their data. So they got an opposite result.

The scientists from both groups say that it’s really critical to figure out why they’re getting different results. It could be due to differences in their methods, and they want to figure out what that discrepancy might mean for the real world. But in the meantime, the researchers of this study say that we should ramp up our monitoring and surveillance efforts for people who are most at risk at disease, like farm workers or dairy workers.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: OK, we’re going to close out here with a pair of stories that both involve invasive insects, and researchers found that some insects like to hitchhike on cars.

JASON DINH: Yes. So there were two studies that happened on opposite sides of the world that suggest that invasive insects are spreading their range by hopping onto our personal vehicles. The first was a citizen-science project in Taiwan where the researchers sorted through Facebook posts looking for reports of ant infestations on cars, and they found 52 cases where ants were really getting into the nooks and crannies in the interior and even the engine. And of the nine species, they found seven of those were invasive.

And, of course, we’re dealing with invasive species here in the US too. There was another totally separate study that showed that spotted lanternflies might be up to the same trick. So these are, as you know, crop pests that cause millions of dollars of agricultural damage each year. And in the decade that they’ve been in the US, they’ve already spread to 18 states, which is quite confounding because they can’t fly long distances.

So scientists wondered if they were spreading by hopping onto cars. This new study wanted to test in the lab whether or not lanternflies could hang on to a car while it experienced high winds like it would on a highway. So they took a white 2011 Ford Escape and put a big box fan in front of it that could blow wind up to 62 miles per hour, and that kind of simulated the conditions of a highway-driving car.

They found that the lanternflies that they put on the car could hold on to all sorts of different places on the vehicle. And even at the highest wind speeds of 62 miles per hour, they were able to hold on at every stage of life. And that last part is really concerning because it means that one female that had just made it could, in theory, hop onto a car carrying 300 fertilized eggs, move to a totally new state, and start a whole new population with her progeny.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: I mean, is there any way to slow this down or stop this from happening?

JASON DINH: Yeah, there are some policies that the government could put in place, but they say that the best bet right now is that if you live in an infested population, check your car and take off any spotted lanternflies that you might see before you take off.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Oh brother. Well, thank you, Jason, for bringing us these stories. Appreciate you, as always.

JASON DINH: Thanks. Always a pleasure.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Jason Dinh, climate editor at Atmos.

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