12/27/2024

The Science That Captivated SciFri’s Reporters In 2024

17:11 minutes

Three people have a conversation into microphones on stage.
From left to right: Ira Flatow, SciFri Producer Kathleen Davis, SciFri Director and Senior Producer Charles Bergquist. Credit: JT Anderson.

Today, we’re taking time to reflect on all that 2024 brought us in the world of science, from the total solar eclipse in April to the demise of the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars and the rise of the blockbuster GLP-1 weight-loss medications. SciFri producers Kathleen Davis and Charles Bergquist join Ira to wrap up the year in science, in a conversation recorded in a live event at WNYC’s Greene Space.


Further Reading


Donate To Science Friday

Invest in quality science journalism by making a donation to Science Friday.

Donate

Segment Guests

Kathleen Davis

Kathleen Davis is a producer and fill-in host at Science Friday, which means she spends her weeks researching, writing, editing, and sometimes talking into a microphone. She’s always eager to talk about freshwater lakes and Coney Island diners.

Charles Bergquist

As Science Friday’s director and senior producer, Charles Bergquist channels the chaos of a live production studio into something sounding like a radio program. Favorite topics include planetary sciences, chemistry, materials, and shiny things with blinking lights.

Segment Transcript

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. For the rest of the hour, we’re going to take a look back at some of the biggest science news stories of the year. And it was a very busy one indeed.

I recently sat down on stage for a year in review celebration at WNYC’s green space in New York and talked with two of our show’s producers who’ve been covering these stories for you. Let me welcome them, Charles Bergquist, Science Friday’s director, senior producer, and our unofficial radio story archivist. Welcome, Charles.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Hey, Ira.

IRA FLATOW: Kathleen Davis, who is our audio producer, state of science champion, and fill in host when I’m not there. She does a great job. Kathleen, welcome. Nice to have you.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Thanks for having me.

IRA FLATOW: All right. So I’ll just start going down the row this way with you, Kathleen. Let’s start with that story that many of our listeners may have experienced themselves, this April’s total solar eclipse.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Yes. April 8 was a big day for a lot of us. North America was really lucky. We experienced this total solar eclipse. So just a little science reminder. This is when the moon passes between the sun and the Earth, and it can block out some of the light. It’s also such a great communal event. I love eclipses, because you get the little glasses and everyone is just standing in the street or in a field, just looking up.

IRA FLATOW: I spent it in a parking lot out of a CVS and it wasn’t working.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: No matter where you are, they’re a blast. So more than 30 million people in North America were in the path of totality. And so that included places like Buffalo and Indianapolis and also down in Texas, a few cities. Even if you weren’t in the path of totality, like here in New York, New York City, we had, I think, about 89% coverage. But it’s still an amazing event.

And so if you did miss this one, you’re in luck, because the next total solar eclipse is in August of 2026. And you have time to plan your trip, because apparently the best places to see this will be in Greenland, Iceland, and Spain. So if you ask me, that sounds like the best time to plan a vacation.

IRA FLATOW: I know one out of the three places I will likely go to. Charles, but we did get some less than stellar news from NASA about the Ingenuity Mars helicopter. Tell us what that was.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, that’s right, Ira. I mean, you may recall the nickname was Ginny. But I always thought of this little helicopter as just this scrappy little guy somehow. And it’s really a kind of a reminder of why you shouldn’t personify your space robots. Because I felt like, I was really sad when it ended.

Just to remind people, this is a little helicopter that went to Mars strapped to the bottom of the Perseverance Rover, landed in 2021. And it was really small. It was like four foot rotor span, I guess you’d say, and weighed about four pounds. And the original idea of this was just to be a demonstration. They weren’t actually trying to get science out of this.

They said we’re going to fly it maybe five times over the course of a month, see if we can answer the important question, can you fly a helicopter on Mars? Because the atmosphere is so much thinner than it is here. They really didn’t know if it would work. Turns out it did work, and they managed to fly it about 72 times over the course of about three years.

IRA FLATOW: Wow.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah. So once they figured out that this was working, they said, we can actually use the helicopter to scout out places for the rovers to go, see where in Jezero Crater we might want to go next. And they also sort of started testing its limits. We know that it can fly. Can it do this? Can it do this other thing? But then in January of 2024, it had a hard landing during one of its missions, broke a rotor, and that pretty much ended the mission.

IRA FLATOW: I hate when that happens. But as most things that NASA has sent to Mars, it really outlived its original estimate.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah. I mean, you’re trying for five flights, you get 72. That’s not bad.

IRA FLATOW: I’ll take that all the time. Charles, back here on Earth, there’s been more news in crises related to our drinking water. The EPA finalized the first ever national limits on acceptable PFAS levels in drinking water. And people are still experiencing issues with access to clean water around the country, right?

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think this year really has been one of both increasing awareness of these chemicals, but also increased efforts to try and do something about them.

IRA FLATOW: And PFAS is what?

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, so PFAS stands for perfluoro and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

IRA FLATOW: Very good.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Which basically means you’ve got a long chain of carbons with a lot of carbon fluorine bonds along it. And those carbon fluorine bonds are super strong. They’re hard to break. That’s part of what made these substances so useful for things like flame retardants and stain repellents. They were used in tons of things for years.

But because those bonds are so hard to break, it also means that once those chemicals are made, they stay around in the environment for a long, long time. So now they’re in the Earth, they’re in the water, they’re in breast milk, they’re in the blood samples of pretty much everybody in this room. And they have been linked to health problems.

So as you mentioned, in April, the EPA said we are finally going to put hard limits on six of these chemicals that cannot be higher than a certain level in your drinking water. They also said that they’re going to give $1 billion to municipalities to help water treatment plants either filter or try and test for these chemicals.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, that’s good news at least.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: It is good news. There’s a lot to be done still. A couple of weeks ago, we reported on some researchers who had come up with a new light activated catalyst that actually can try and break that carbon fluorine bond that I talked about. It’s not ready for prime time yet, but these efforts to try and clean up the PFAS instead of just filtering it out are definitely a good sign.

IRA FLATOW: Charles, you got an A in chemistry, I’m sure.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: I did.

IRA FLATOW: In college. Kathleen, let’s talk a little about the advances in health care and medicine. The first CRISPR based therapy was approved by the FDA in the past year. Is that important? What’s so important about that?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: It’s hugely important. I mean, CRISPR is one of the most, I think, amazing medical technologies that we have right now. It is the ability to pinpoint certain genes and modify them while they’re still in the body.

So at the very tail end of last year, the first CRISPR based therapies were approved by the FDA. This was a huge step in these therapies. So these were two different therapies that were both for sickle cell disease. So as I think a lot of people know, sickle cell disease is this condition where red blood cells are malformed. It can be incredibly debilitating. It affects about 100,000 Americans in the US, most of African descent. And again, it is a very debilitating condition.

And as I said, there were two gene therapies that both do pretty much the same thing. And they are one time treatments, which is pretty incredible. The downside is that they’re incredibly expensive. They are $2 to $3 million per treatment, which is obviously way outside of the budgets of many people. But this approval is the first step to get more of these CRISPR based therapies approved for a general public. And I think that’s a huge step.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, that’s good to hear. Let’s stay on the health beat a little bit longer, because I know that another story that you’ve been following is access to abortion care has been a really big story again this year. Remind us how access has changed across the country in 2024.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: It’s hard to talk about medical news without talking about abortion. So as I think we all know, in 2022, Roe versus Wade was struck down. That eliminated the federal constitutional standard for abortion in the US. So this became a states issue. And in many places, it became kind of the wild west in terms of care.

And so there’s been a lot of fallout in the last two years. OB-GYNs that we’ve had on Science Friday have said that they are moving out of states where abortion has been extremely limited or completely made illegal. One statistic that I always think about is earlier this year, we had a physician on from Idaho, where there was a report that said in the last two years, almost a quarter of all OB-GYNs had left the state,.

IRA FLATOW: That was amazing. I remember that.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: They said they just couldn’t ethically do their jobs. And I do think it’s important when we talk about this issue that across the board, even across all political ideologies, support for abortion is actually pretty high. It stands at about 63%.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. We asked our listeners for some of their most memorable science news stories from the last year. Here’s what LA from South Carolina sent us. For me, the biggest science breakthrough this year has to be the approval of weight loss injections by Medicare. I know these things have been around for a while, but when the purse strings opened, my life changed. After six months, my health has shown considerable improvement, especially in those systems affected by diabetes. I was demoted to pre-diabetic from hardcore and at the age of 71, see more possibilities than I did at 61.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Yeah, I think this has been one of the biggest science and health stories for a lot of people, because it’s so personal. These drugs that this listener was talking about include things like Ozempic, Wegovy. They’re called GLP-1 agonist medications. And basically what they do is they trigger the release of insulin from the pancreas. And this suppresses the appetite. It increases feelings of fullness. It slows digestion.

These drugs are meant to treat conditions like type 2 diabetes, but they’re also prescribed in some cases for weight loss. And many people report that these have been incredibly successful for them personally.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, I’ll bet you there are people in our audience who take it or know somebody who has been taking these drugs. Yeah, it’s so widespread. Charles, let’s move on to some exciting news from the fossil world. We always cover fossil stuff.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: We do. Yeah, I mean, people love fossils, right? But this is a fun one. Researchers exploring the Richards Spur limestone cave system, this is a paleontological hotbed in Oklahoma, found fossilized reptile skin. And what’s cool here is it’s estimated at 288 million years old, which is 130 million years older than the previous old skin record holder.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. That’s a dubious nice distinction. Yeah, absolutely.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: You got to strive for something, right? So they think that because of the way the cave system is set up, it’s got this really dry environment, it’s got these clay sediments, and it’s got this oil that sort of seeps through the sediments from even older critters that have broken down. And they think that that’s what preserved this sample. They’re not big. They’re fingernail size.

IRA FLATOW: The size of the fossil–

CHARLES BERGQUIST: The skin samples.

IRA FLATOW: The skin samples. Yeah.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: So they’re fingernail sized. But they say that they can see it’s sort of crocodile-like. You’ve got these sort of disconnected scales that don’t overlap. But they say that looking between the scales, they can see these sort of hinge-like structures that are like what you would see in a modern snake or a legless lizard.

And the reason that this is sort of significant is that 288 million years ago, this is like these are some of the first critters to live most of their lives on dry land. So you’re opening up the whole history of skin formation.

IRA FLATOW: And it’s always really fascinating when you can actually have a sample of skin versus just the hard bone.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, they’ve got both the fossilized skin and also impressions of the skin in other things that gives them information about what these critters might actually have looked like.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. One of our favorite subjects on Science Friday every time we can talk about it. And Kathleen, I remember one of your favorite stories to report from this year was about an animal closer to home than ancient lizards, ants. What could be so exciting about ants?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Well, I’ll tell you. So a little bit of context. Back in 2011, scientists were doing a survey of ants in Manhattan, as you do if you are an ant scientist, I suppose.

IRA FLATOW: Sometimes you have no choice in the matter.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Not a bad place to do ant research, I guess. And these entomologists found something really interesting. They found a new type of ant that they hadn’t seen before in Manhattan. And this was an ant that was fairly large. And side note, the way that these entomologists do this research is just the best. So they basically use a giant straw. They stick it into a flower bed in Times Square, for example.

IRA FLATOW: I know that flower bed.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: They suck up the ants and they go– not in the mouth, into a container. And then they can do their ant survey. So not my job, but it’s somebody’s job. So fast forward to this year. In 2024, this ant has dramatically established itself in Manhattan specifically, I’m not joking, off of Broadway.

IRA FLATOW: No comment necessary.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: It’s been identified now as lasius emarginatus, which is actually native to Europe. So the big question now is, OK, how did these little ants not only get to New York, but really establish themselves?

IRA FLATOW: If you’ve been to Broadway, you know the answer to that.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Well, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere is what they say. And so it’s too early to know how this is going to affect the ant ecosystem in New York City. But obviously scientists are keeping an eye out for it.

IRA FLATOW: How do they survive? I mean, we remember seeing those pictures of the rat carrying a piece of pizza. What are the ants–

KATHLEEN DAVIS: I think urban animals are just very scrappy. And I think those flower beds are pretty warm. But I have to say, the scientists want the public to help in identifying sightings of this ant, especially if you find it outside the city. iNaturalist has a specific page where you can do this, and I have to say it’s not called the Manhattan Project. It’s called the “Manhatt-Ant” Project.

IRA FLATOW: You out dad joked me today. And what does it look like again?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: It is a fairly large ant. It is dark brown with a reddish midsection. So you might need your special glasses for that one.

IRA FLATOW: Get your glasses. Get out your– yeah, I love looking for that. Charles, let’s close out with our final story for the series roundup. And it’s an exciting one. And I’m talking about scientists announced this October that they completed the mapping of the entire brain of a fruit fly.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yes. I mean.

IRA FLATOW: This is important.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: This is very important. This is work looking at something called the connectome, which is basically mapping out the connections between everything in the brain. It’s sort of like a wiring diagram for the brain. And you say, OK, fruit fly. How complicated can that be? But they ended up mapping the connections between 140,000 different neurons in this teeny little brain, which connecting back and forth, that works out to 50 million different linkages.

IRA FLATOW: Wow.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: So this is a huge project. To do this, they took 21 million scanning electron microscope images of fruit fly brains. They gave them to an AI that sort of puzzle pieced them together. But then they combined that data with volunteers who sort of traced the connections, the individual connections.

IRA FLATOW: One at a time.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah. I mean, this is years worth of person power going into this. And this is key to being able to start to link together which neuron does which behavior. We’re going to start with the fruit fly, eventually moved to larger animals. But I mean, to your point, this was in 140,000 neurons. Estimates of human brains is 86 billion neurons. So they got a ways to go.

IRA FLATOW: Got a ways to go. I want to thank you both for filling us in on some great science stories for 2024. Thank you very much. Charles Bergquist, director and senior producer at Science Friday. Kathleen Davis, producer and fill in host at Science Friday.

Copyright © 2024 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday’s programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/

Meet the Producers and Host

About John Dankosky

John Dankosky works with the radio team to create our weekly show, and is helping to build our State of Science Reporting Network. He’s also been a long-time guest host on Science Friday. He and his wife have three cats, thousands of bees, and a yoga studio in the sleepy Northwest hills of Connecticut. 

About Ira Flatow

Ira Flatow is the founder and host of Science FridayHis green thumb has revived many an office plant at death’s door.

Explore More

The Best of Science Friday, 2024

Fossil sales, a solar eclipse, and hacking your brain: This was a big year for science. Our staff pick their favorite projects.

Read More