Growing Glaciers, Expanding Universe, Flu Near You. March 29, 2019, Part 1

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🗓️ 29 March 2019

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Once upon a time, everything in the universe was crammed into a very small space. Then came the Big Bang, and the universe has been expanding ever since. But just how fast is it expanding? Calculating that number is a challenge that dates back almost a hundred years, when Edwin Hubble used data from Harvard astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt to try to answer that question. His value came to be called the Hubble constant, H0. But the exact value of that constant has been hard to pin down. And now two different approaches to measuring the Hubble constant have come up with close, but different answers—and each team says they're pretty confident in the accuracy of their measurements. Ira speaks to science writer and author Anil Ananthaswamy and Nobel laureate Adam Riess to discuss the discrepancy. This flu season, Science Friday teamed up with Flu Near You to ask listeners to track their symptoms to create a map of influenza-like illness across the country. Nearly three thousand SciFri users participated. Science Friday education director Ariel Zych and biostatician Kristin Baltrusaitis, who was a research assistant for Flu Near You, tells us how the SciFri community results stacked up to the rest of participants. Plus, epidemiologist Karen Martin gives an update on how this season compares to years past and how the Minnesota Department of Health uses Flu Near You data for surveillance on a local level. See the results here. It’s become the familiar refrain in this era of climate change: Warmer temperatures, retreating glaciers, and rising sea levels. But when it comes to Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier, it seems the drumbeat of disaster may have halted—for now. Scientists report in the journal Nature Geoscience this week that the once fast-retreating ice sheet has been thickening over the last few years instead. It’s a reversal of a twenty-year trend of thinning and retreating, but perhaps not for long. Ala Khazendar, researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, joins Ira to explain why this glacial about-face may not be the cause for celebration that we think it is in this week’s Good Thing, Bad Thing. And Gizmodo writer Ryan Mandelbaum talks about the canceled all-female space walk, NASA's lunar ambitions, and more in this week's News Roundup.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Iraflato. Later in the hour, a conundrum facing astronomers trying to measure the
0:07.8	expansion of the universe. But first, for those of us looking forward to one day returning to the
0:13.3	moon, experts have said it could be possible by the year 28, less than 10 years from now. But this
0:20.0	week, the Trump administration condensed that
0:22.8	timeline even further. Vice President Mike Pence directed NASA to put American astronauts on the
0:28.6	moon within the next five years using, quote, any means necessary. But how realistic is that?
0:36.2	Here to tell us what we can glean from this announcement,
0:39.0	as well as other short subjects in science, is Ryan Mandelbaum, science writer with Gizmodo. Always
0:44.9	good to see you, Ryan.
0:45.9	Always great to be here. Ira, how's everything going? Fine. Let's talk about this.
0:50.0	The Trump administration says it wants to get to the moon in five years. Is this possible? Is it wishful thinking? Well, I guess anything is possible with enough money, Ira. And I think that was the question that a lot of the people I spoke to had when they heard this was, okay, well, the Apollo mission was really expensive. Are you going to give us the money to send people to the moon in time? I don't know.
1:12.3	That's such a question.
1:13.2	What would happen?
1:14.1	What would have to happen?
1:30.8	Would Congress have to suddenly say, hey, here's a pile of money to do this? Yeah. I mean, well, so as you said, the current estimates are 2028. They want it by 2024. And I think it's just this weird sort of dissonance for me because NASA's working on the SLS, this big rocket.
1:38.1	They've just, they've been pushing these timelines, and they've just delayed in this new Trump budget, is actually delayed part of the SLS.
1:44.4	And actually, Brian Stein then said at this meeting that they would need that part in order to get astronauts to the moon.
1:59.3	Well, Pence's sort of the retort is that he will, you know, he wants private industry to do it. Whatever it takes, you know, get us to the moon. That's what they, whatever it takes. It means it could be Elon Musk who gets us. Sure, yeah. And then I think part of that, it's in the context of saying,
2:03.5	sort of declaring that we're in a new space race against China and Russia, which, okay.
2:03.5	Well, we need, you know, And then I think part of that, it's in the context of saying, sort of declaring that we're in a new space race against China and Russia, which, okay.
2:07.5	Well, we need, you know, that's what got us to the moon in the first place was the space race.
2:09.2	Maybe we need a new space race.
	...

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