COVID-19 Supplies Shortage, Citizen Science Month, Mercury Discovery. April 3, 2020, Part 1

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🗓️ 3 April 2020

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

April is Citizen Science Month! It’s a chance for everyone to contribute to the scientific process—including collecting data, taking observations, or helping to analyze a set of big data. And best of all, a lot of these projects can be done wherever you happen to be personally isolating. Caren Cooper, an associate professor at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and co-author of the new book A Field Guide To Citizen Science: How You Can Contribute to Scientific Research and Make a Difference, joins Ira to talk about what makes a good citizen science project, how to get involved, and suggestions for projects in all fields of science. Cooper is also the project leader for the citizen science project Crowd The Tap, looking at mapping water infrastructure and the prevalence of lead pipes throughout the country. For more projects to keep you company through this Citizen Science Month and beyond, head over to sciencefriday.com/citizenscience. Mercury is the smallest planet in the solar system and the closest to the sun. The temperature there can reach up to 800 degrees, but the planet is not an inert, dry rock. Scientists recently found water ice at the poles of the planet, and another team found possible evidence for the chemicals building blocks of life underneath Mercury’s rocky terrain—a landscape pitted with impact craters and haphazardly strewn hills. Those results were published in the journal Scientific Reports. Planetary astronomer Deborah Domingue takes us on a planetary tour and talks about what Mercury can tell us about the rest of the solar system. All sorts of COVID-19 treatments have been proposed, but some are more promising than others. One of these experimental treatments is using the blood plasma from recovered patients to infuse antibodies into those who are currently sick. This week, New York put out a call for plasma donations, becoming the first state to attempt this approach. Sarah Zhang of The Atlantic talks about what we know about the effectiveness and hurdles of this type of treatment. She also discusses the second wave of COVID-19 infections hitting Asia, and the CDC’s changing stance on personal face mask usage.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Just a note, we won't be taking calls this hour.
0:05.5	This is a prerecorded hour due to the need for physical distancing. But first, during the
0:11.4	COVID-19 pandemic we're all going through, all sorts of treatments have been proposed. Some of them
0:17.8	more promising than others. One of those experimental treatments is using the
0:22.7	blood plasma from people who have recovered from the disease, hoping that the antibodies from
0:29.0	these recovered patients could help those currently who are sick. Here to fill us in on that
0:35.3	story is Sarah Zang. She's a staff writer at the Atlantic
0:38.7	based out of Washington. Welcome to Science Friday. Nice to have you back. Hi, thanks for having me.
0:45.0	Now, the idea of using blood plasma from survivors to treat patients, this is not a new idea,
0:51.4	is it? And how does this work? It's actually a really old idea. It comes from the
0:55.2	late 19th century from before we had antibiotics or vaccines or antivirals. And that's basically the
1:01.8	situation we are in right now with coronavirus, right? So the idea is that it's pretty hard to make
1:06.4	a drug or a vaccine from scratch. But we have all these people walking around whose immune
1:10.7	systems that figured out how to make antibodies, which are these proteins that can really specific or a vaccine from scratch. But we have all these people walking around whose immune systems
1:11.1	that figured out how to make antibodies, which are these proteins that can really specifically
1:15.2	target and neutralize the coronavirus. So if we could just harness this ability of all these
1:20.7	survivors and collect their blood plasma. And plasma is the kind of yellow liquid that our red blood
1:26.2	cells are bathed in. If we could just collect that, maybe that could help people who are still sick.
1:30.6	I understand that the synagogue in Westchester, the congregants who were sick and have recovered,
1:36.5	are now donating their blood for just such a reason.
1:39.3	Exactly.
1:39.8	So after Mount Sinai Hospital in New York put out a call for donors, they were actually really
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