A Small Meteor Blazes Over New York City

RACHEL FELTMAN: This is Science Friday. I’m Rachel Feltman, sitting in for Ira Flatow. You may have heard me on my podcast, the Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, or on Scientific American show, Science Quickly, which I just started hosting a few months ago, or maybe even occasionally on the news roundup here. And I’m happy to be filling in for Ira while he’s away this week.

Later in the hour, what’s behind a recent FDA decision not to approve a therapy involving MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder? And we’ll also be talking about some shark science. But first, Friday morning dawned with computer glitches around the world affecting scores of industries. Here to explain that and with other stories from the week in science is Science Friday’s Senior Producer, Charles Bergquist. Hi, Charles.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Hey, Rachel.

RACHEL FELTMAN: How’s it going?

CHARLES BERGQUIST: For me, it’s OK, but it’s been a messy morning for a lot of people.

RACHEL FELTMAN: It has. It has. Why don’t you tell us more?

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah so it’s been a morning of blue screen computers. Not a great day if you needed to go to the airport or visit the bank, or do a lot of other things. On a more serious note, this has affected 911 services in a bunch of states, and some medical centers are reporting problems too.

RACHEL FELTMAN: So do we know what actually happened?

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, this appears to be an outage affecting some business computers that are running Microsoft Windows, but it’s caused by a faulty software update pushed by the global security company CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike says it doesn’t appear to be the result of like a cyber attack or anything, rather just a bad patch that has caused all these problems.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Yeah, definitely a new level of blue screen of death dread, but definitely something to keep following.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah. You know, it really just shows how interconnected all these systems are, and also the problems of being reliant on just one or two services, right. Everyone using the same platform is great when it lets your airlines talk to each other and share information more seamlessly. But it’s not great when a bunch of the major airlines all go down together.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Yeah. Well, speaking of things going down, I guess, earlier this week, some New York City residents heard a boom and saw a flash. What was up with this explosion?

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah. Tuesday morning, a small meteor entered the atmosphere over New York City. It flew over the Statue of Liberty and into New Jersey. And personally, I’m sad because according to the maps, it pretty much passed straight over my house, and I didn’t see or hear it at all.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Same here. I think maybe I assumed it was construction noise, if anything. But is this something we should be worried about in addition to being excited?

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, NASA says even though it was an impressive boom and a cool daytime fireball, this is a really small object, maybe like a foot in size, or using science’s standard international appliance units, the size of a toaster. They say it’s pretty much impossible for something that size to have debris that reaches the ground, but they do estimate it was moving around 38,000 miles an hour.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Wow. So do we have anyone keeping track of all these flying toasters?

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, not at this size. You really can’t. So NASA and other space agencies do keep track, of course, of larger near-earth objects. But the only way they usually learn about smaller stuff like this is when it enters the atmosphere like this and someone sees it.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Yeah. Well, I know you have another story about an object that astronomers are tracking.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah. This week, the European Space Agency announced that they’re planning a mission to fly by the asteroid Apophis. That’s a much larger object that’s supposed to come very near the Earth in 2029. It’s supposed to pass around 1/10 of the distance from Earth to the moon, so super close. The track of the asteroid appears it won’t be a threat to Earth either now or any time in the future, but they’re planning to send a mission called Ramses to fly by this asteroid before and after that close Earth encounter in 2029 for science.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Well, 2029 sounds super fast, at least for a space mission. Maybe not for almost anything else, but for space, very fast.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, very fast. To get into position for this flyby, they’ll need to launch by April 2028, which is like tomorrow in space terms.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Yeah, yesterday in space terms.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, especially considering they don’t exactly have all the funding put together yet for this. But the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which you remember brought back the asteroid samples from Bennu, is also going to be headed for this flyby. But because of where it is, it won’t get there until after the asteroid passes Earth.

RACHEL FELTMAN: But you know, we’ll have a second chance to at least get a peek at that object if we don’t make it in time. But hopefully we do. Moving on to another kind of threat there’s new work this week on rogue waves in the ocean. Tell me more.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, these are waves that are at least twice the size of other waves in the area, but they can be much, much larger, like dozens of feet high, swallow up your boat larger. And they’re very unpredictable. So this can really be a threat to ships or exposed structures like lighthouses.

In work this week, researchers have developed a computer system that used machine learning plus tons of measurements from ocean buoys to try and predict when these waves are going to come up. And they say that their system can correctly predict 73% of these abnormally large waves something like 5 minutes before they occur, which, you know, really could be a big deal. It would give people time to take some action.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of destruction here. Let’s talk about something a little less catastrophic for a bit. What do you have for me?

CHARLES BERGQUIST: So there’s a cool paper out this week looking at the genetics of human traits. This is one of those papers that sifts through thousands and thousands of genomes, looking to find bits of the genome that seem to be connected to specific characteristics. So this won’t give you like, this is the gene for X, but it can be a place for researchers to start looking.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Yeah. So what’s new about this study, because I feel like we see headlines like this all the time?

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, so these GWAS studies, Genome-Wide Association Studies, are really only as good as the sample set that they’ve been searching through, right? A lot of those older studies involved samples that really overemphasized Europeans.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Right.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: This new paper makes use of a different biobank, which is data from the US Department of Veterans Affairs Million Veterans Program. And the military tends to have a lot more diversity in its members. So this study was able to find new associations that didn’t turn up in some of those older studies, including a bunch of things that only show up when you do add in all that non-European data. They do caution, though, you know, the military data set tends to skew male and older. So it’s still not a perfectly representative sample for us.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Right, but inching in the right direction, so very cool.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah.

RACHEL FELTMAN: In other biology news, there’s new work on where we all came from. Is that right?

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah. So, you know, normally when people use that phrase, they’re talking anthropology, like ancient hominids or something. But this is looking at an organism called LUCA, the Last Common Ancestor, something that would have given rise to every living thing, even before the tree of life started to split into bacteria, archaea and eukarya.

RACHEL FELTMAN: I’ve always thought LUCA was such a great name. But do we know what this thing was yet?

CHARLES BERGQUIST: No, not really. But the work here is trying to estimate when it was, right? So you track the rate of mutations backwards. How long would it have taken to pile up all the billions of mutations that led to all the different species of life? And they come up with an answer of 4.2 billion years ago, which is about 400 million years after the formation of Earth, which is like geologic time, that’s a blink of an eye. It’s Earth was still like a complete hellscape then.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Yeah. It’s such a cool way for them to look back in time, just being like, how weird have we gotten, and how long would that take? I love that.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: How long would it take to get us all this messed up? Yes.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Exactly, yeah. Staying on biology for a minute, there’s a new important finding about bees?

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah. So I mean, we all know that bees can be really good defenders when they feel threatened, right?

RACHEL FELTMAN: Yeah.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: But you know, beyond that basic sting response, there are a bunch of other behaviors that they have to protect their hives. And this week, researchers studying the Asian or Japanese honeybee report that they’ve observed a defensive maneuver that they had not known about before.

RACHEL FELTMAN: I can’t wait to hear what that is.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: It is slapping.

RACHEL FELTMAN: What?

CHARLES BERGQUIST: They have this video, which is really worth a watch, of this small ant walking up to the entrance of the hive. And the bees guarding the entrance kind of pivot around and just give the ant a good bop on the head with its wing and flick it away from their nest.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Wow.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: You know, this technique doesn’t always work for them, but at the very least, that slap seemed to kind of stun the ant and left it open to some kind of follow-up defense.

RACHEL FELTMAN: I mean, I’m stunned, and I’m not even the one the bee slapped. So incredible. Back up into orbit, I think you have a story about research into space flavors, which sounds delightful. Please tell me more.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, so I mean, we’ve probably have the experience that food on an airplane even doesn’t quite taste right, even if you make exceptions for lioke the stroopwafels and stuff.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Sure.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: But it turns out that astronauts on the International Space Station experience some of those same issues. Food is just too bland and doesn’t taste the same in orbit as on the ground. And researchers are trying to figure out why that is.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Yeah, I’ve definitely heard astronauts raving about hot sauce in space as being really vital. So what did this new study find?

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, so in the past, part of this blandness effect has been attributed just to congestion. Apparently, when you go to space, the fluids in your head can move around, and you kind of get a stuffy nose, which as we know, leads to decreased odors. But the weird thing is that that swelling goes down after you’ve been on the Space Station for a while, but that taste effect remains. And so that can’t be the whole story.

One thought is that the loneliness and isolation of the Space Station can have an effect on perception. Here, researchers tested a bunch of odors on people wearing VR headsets and in a simulation of the ISS. And they found that this effect was different on different odors. Vanilla and almond smelled stronger in simulated Space Station environment than in the control environment. But weirdly, the lemon aroma stays the same.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Ha, wow. Fascinating. Also, why do we care?

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Well, you know, we’re entering a period of longer-duration spaceflights, and beyond people just wanting to have a good experience working and living in space, if your food doesn’t taste right, you might not be eating as much as you need to. And that can be a health issue.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Yeah, that makes sense. I think we have time for one last space story, and this one is about a song.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yes. So this week, NASA’s deep space network system beamed a Missy Elliott track, “The Rain,” out to the planet Venus. It took about 14 minutes to get there from Earth.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Amazing. Is there any science here to talk about?

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Not really. Maybe it’s a technology story.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Who cares?

CHARLES BERGQUIST: You know, Venus does supposedly have rain from sulfuric acid clouds. But mainly, you know, this is just a cool thing to do. The last song they officially sent out like this was the Beatles’ “Across the Universe” in 2008.

[MISSY ELLIOTT, “THE RAIN”] I can’t stand the rain

Can you stand the rain?

Can you stand the rain?

That’s all the time we have. Charles, thanks so much for coming to do the newest roundup in reverse with me today.

Always a pleasure, Rachel. Thanks for having me.

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