Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! Let’s kick off the week by catching up on the latest science news. For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.
We’ll start with some good news: it turns out that Earth is habitable! That’s according to the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, a.k.a. Juice, which made a flyby of our planet recently.
The ESA took the opportunity to do a test run of Juice’s instruments, which it will use to look for molecular signatures of habitability on the moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. It’s actually making several loops around the sun to get a gravity assist to slingshot it all the way into Jupiter’s orbit, so it’s going to make a few more flybys before it finally gets to its destination in 2031.
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But if we want to keep that habitability status, we really need to clean up our act. Last Tuesday a study found that human methane emissions jumped by 15 to 20 percent between 2000 and 2020, which is the most recent year we have complete data for. Methane levels in the air have more than doubled compared to preindustrial levels.
The study also found an increase in natural methane emissions from sources like tropical wetlands, which is likely due to factors that include rising temperatures. Methane dissipates from the atmosphere much faster than carbon dioxide does, but it’s also a much more potent greenhouse gas—meaning it causes more warming. So cutting our methane emissions won’t solve the climate crisis on its own, but it could make a pretty big impact in the short term.
One large source of methane in the atmosphere is fracking for natural gas—which, fun fact, is actually a fossil fuel that’s mostly made of methane. A few years ago a study found that folks were way less likely to think favorably about so-called natural gas if it was referred to as “methane gas,” which, again, it literally is. It’s gas! The gas is gas. No matter how natural you call it. Of course fracking isn’t the only big methane emitter we have to worry about, cows and landfills are also a huge part of the problem.
We’ve actually got some troubling news on the landfill front, thanks to a study out last Thursday in the journal Science. Since 2014 nine states have made it illegal for grocery chains and other so-called commercial waste generators to dispose of their food waste in landfills, according to the study. That should have cut down on overall food waste by something like 10 to 15 percent in those locations.
Researchers put together a massive waste dataset to evaluate the progress of California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont and Massachusetts, which were reportedly the first five states to implement these changes. And the researchers are giving the states’ progress a big thumbs-down, with one exception: Massachusetts is absolutely crushing it. The study authors credited the state’s robust composting infrastructure, its use of simple language for the food waste law and the fact that Massachusetts actually enforced the policy with inspections.
Speaking of the atmosphere, a team of scientists from Spain and Japan say greenhouse gases aren’t the only intruders swirling around up there. In a study published last week, researchers reported on samples of microbes they collected via plane from as high as almost 10,000 feet [3,000 meters]. They found more than 266 types of fungi and 305 types of bacteria, some of which they were able to culture back in the lab.
While many of the microbes they found have the potential to make people sick, one of the researchers noted that it seems unlikely people get ill from far-flung pathogens carried on the breeze with any regularity.
Now for some “wow, Earth is just wild” news, scientists say they’ve finally found an explanation for a strange seismic signal detected in September 2023. Basically, the planet vibrated for nine days, and no one was totally sure why. A study published last Thursday blamed a climate-change-induced landslide in Greenland. Scientists say a melting glacier collapsed under the weight of the rock face above it, sending enough rock and ice to fill 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools into the fjord below.
They estimate that the backsplash was more than 650 feet [200 meters] high, and sent out a roughly 360-foot [110-meter] wave that extended for miles. While the wave quickly shrank down to double-digit heights and then petered out to almost nothing, it kept sloshing back and forth across the narrow fjord—something like every 90 seconds for nine days. One study author said this was the first time sloshing water had been identified as a global seismic signal for days at a time.
If Earth isn’t wild enough for you, you can always go to space—if you’re a billionaire, anyway. Last Tuesday, after several delays, tech billionaire Jared Isaacman’s chartered SpaceX flight finally took off and reached a peak altitude of about 870 miles [1,401 kilometers]. That broke the record NASA set for orbiting height in 1966 and makes the Polaris Dawn mission the furthest anyone has been out in space since the final Apollo mission in 1972. Last Thursday two of the crew members pulled off another first by completing an all-civilian space walk.
Now let’s head back to Earth for some health news. A new study adds to the growing body of research on disparities in healthcare for pregnant people. According to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that analyzed nearly one million births in dozens of New Jersey hospitals, Black women are more likely to receive unnecessary cesarean sections than their white counterparts.
The researchers say that if a Black pregnant person and a white pregnant person with similar medical histories arrived at the same hospital and see the same doctor, the Black parent would be about 25 percent more likely to undergo a cesarean delivery.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and WHO [World Health Organization] have both previously sounded the alarm on unnecessary c-sections, which introduce a greater risk of infection and other surgical complications.
To wrap us up, I have some unusually optimistic AI news—I know, very unlike me. Researchers wanted to test new ways to combat conspiracy theories, and the generative AI platform GPT-4 Turbo came to mind as a possible tool.
Basically, they were interested in its ability to deliver a bunch of information while also tailoring its approach based on user input and feedback. So, in other words, the chatbot takes the place of an incredibly patient, nonjudgmental person who has the whole Internet at their disposal, has been told to adapt their tactics based on how their conversation partner reacts and has the sole mission of replacing conspiracy theories with facts, which is a pretty tall order. So, yeah, if AI can do it for us, I’m all for it.
About 2,000 participants were asked to identify and describe a conspiracy theory they believed, along with their supporting evidence. The resulting conversations, which lasted an average of 8.4 minutes, weren’t always effective—especially when people said that conspiracy was really central to their worldview. But surprisingly, about one in four participants disavowed their conspiracy of choice by the end of the conversation, and follow-up showed that these results held up two months later.
Now, AI-generated content is also a massive source of misinformation, but this is a great example of how cool language learning models have the potential to be—when we use them thoughtfully and train them to do something specific instead of just trying to replicate a human brain. You can try out the model used in this particular study at DebunkBot.com.
That’s all for this week’s news roundup. We’ll be back on Wednesday with a fascinating conversation on prostate cancer prevention. And don’t forget to tune in on Friday for our latest Fascination miniseries, which features the fabulous math-teaching drag queen Kyne. I have to say, I am not the kind of person who usually wants to sit down and chat about the beauty and the mystery of math. I was an average math student at best. But Kyne fully managed to convert me. I now believe that math is gorgeous and mysterious and enigmatic and incredible. So you should definitely check out the series.
One more quick thing: if you’re enjoying the show, please do us a favor and leave a rating or review, or follow us or subscribe to us—basically whatever your podcast platform of choice will let you do to say, “This show is alright.” You can also send us questions, comments and suggestions for topics you’d like us to cover at ScienceQuickly@sciam.com.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. 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!
