Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, this is Rachel Feltman.
First, I just want to say that I believe radical optimism is going to be an important part of our tool kit in the months to come. So I’m going to do my best to bring you stories that show how innovation can help change the world for the better. We’re going to keep introducing you to brilliant people who are working to solve problems that seem insurmountable. We’re going to keep taking you to places you’ve never been to learn things that broaden your horizons and offer you new ways of seeing the world. We’re also going to try to provide you with joy and levity and that indescribable “wow, gee whiz” feeling as often as we can because we know that’s so important.
Okay. So. Let’s kick off the week by catching up on some of the latest science news.
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The world’s first wooden satellite arrived at the International Space Station last Tuesday. The Japanese spacecraft is just four inches square. As I’ve mentioned before on Science Quickly, the rapidly growing number of metal satellites in orbit pose a real threat to our planet’s ozone layer. That’s because spacecraft made mostly of aluminum produce hazardous aluminum oxide when they burn up in the atmosphere, which is an inevitable part of their life cycle. I’ll spare you the inorganic chemistry, but those aluminum oxide particles can kick off reactions between ozone and chlorine in the Earth’s atmosphere. LignoSat contains electronic sensors, but its body is made of magnolia wood. Researchers hope to deploy the cubesat from the ISS and collect data as it orbits the planet for several months.
Speaking of space: last Wednesday NASA’s Parker Solar Probe took a crucial step toward making a record-breaking pass of the sun. On December 24 the probe is expected to pass within 3.86 million miles of the solar surface—breaking its own 2023 record of 4.51 million miles.
Parker has been breaking records since its launch in 2018. That year the probe passed within 26.55 million miles of the sun's surface, surpassing a record set in the 1970s.
Last Wednesday the probe flew by Venus to use the planet’s gravity to propel it into its new orbit. NASA says the December solar pass will bring the spacecraft “close enough to pass inside a solar eruption, like a surfer diving under a crashing ocean wave.”
Back on Earth things are looking pretty dry. The U.S. Drought Monitor reports that nearly every state in the country is experiencing drought—Alaska and Kentucky are the only exceptions. From October 23 through 29 more than 150 million people around the U.S. were in a drought, which marked a roughly 34 percent increase over the week before.
Climate change is contributing to drought in more ways than you might think. While some areas are seeing less rain in general—which of course creates arid conditions—others are getting most or all of their rain all at once.
There’s a limit to how much water soil can absorb, so an excessive dump doesn’t necessarily leave behind extra moisture for us to rely on during not-so-rainy days. Instead that water becomes what we call runoff, which flows across the ground until it enters a stream or another body of water.
Climate change seems to be making these big bursts of precipitation more common. So when it rains, it pours, and it floods, and we’re still liable to end up in a drought down the line. With such wide swaths of the country in drought right now, it’s not a bad idea to take water-conserving measures no matter how things look where you live. Consider taking shorter showers, and make sure you turn off the faucet while you brush your teeth and scrub dishes.
Speaking of water, here’s a news story to get you fired up about one of my favorite things to hate: plastics! If you’re just joining us (on Science Quickly and also, like, on Earth), most plastics are literally made of fossil fuels, and they’ve shown up pretty much everywhere, from Antarctica to the human brain.
Last Wednesday a new study found that microplastics could even be mucking up our ability to clean wastewater for reuse. The researchers suspected that tiny plastic particles known as microplastics, which provide a happy home for microbes to create robust colonies called biofilms, might keep potential pathogens alive through the wastewater treatment process. Sure enough, the researchers identified a few nasty types of bacteria and viruses that persisted after the water was treated. This is just one more piece of evidence in a growing pile that shows we need to address our reliance on plastic.
Let’s end with a couple of fun stories.
First: you know how sometimes, when someone is watching you work, it makes you kind of, like, knuckle down and really get the thing done, and sometimes having an audience can make you choke instead? Apparently those instincts are older than our species.
In a study published last Friday, researchers reported that chimpanzees are subject to what’s called the “audience effect,” too. The study reviewed years of data on chimps performing number-based tasks on touch screens. It turns out that the chimps’ performance was impacted by how many humans were watching and whether the animals knew the spectators. When it came to the toughest numerical tasks, the chimps seemed to perform better as an audience of experimenters grew. But they were more likely to fumble the easiest tasks in the presence of a crowd of experimenters and familiar audience members. The researchers are hoping to use these insights to better understand how humans developed similar behavior.
Lastly, here’s one for you sports fans. As you may already know, every single baseball used in every single major league game gets a special little spa treatment: it’s scrubbed down with mud that comes from a single secret spot somewhere along a tributary of the Delaware River. The idea is that this mud bath makes the balls easier to grip. No team is willing to mess around with substitutes, but the je ne sais quoi of this particular goop was only recently subjected to scientific study. In a paper published last Monday, researchers confirmed that the mud really does have a certain something going for it.
The research team put some of the magic mud in a precision instrument called a rheometer, which applies different kinds of force to figure out the fluid flows, to quantify the spreadability of the substance. The researchers also used an atomic force microscope to measure how much force the mud resisted with as an instrument pulled away from it—in other words, its stickiness. They even made a fake human finger out of rubber—which they coated with whale oil to mimic the natural goop of human skin—to approximate the friction of a ball against a pitchers’ hands.
All that data proves what baseball players have been saying for years: the mud works. Its consistency makes it as easy to spread as face cream, which allows for uniform coverage on a ball. But the stickiness of the clay helps all the tiny particles of sand suspended within it adhere to the ball so the muck dries as grippy as sandpaper. Neat!
That’s all for this week’s science news roundup. We’ll be back on Wednesday to learn how insects have helped shape human culture.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Anaissa Ruiz Tejada. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great week!
