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Science Friday

Youth Climate Protest, Science Talent Search Winners, Snowflake Changes. March 15, 2019, Part 1

Science Friday

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Life Sciences, Wnyc, Science, Friday, Natural Sciences

4.4 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2019

⏱️ 47 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It all started with 16-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg. Last August, Thunberg started skipping school on Fridays to protest outside Sweden’s parliament, insisting her country get behind the Paris Climate Agreement. Her protests have inspired thousands of young people around the world to join the #FridaysForFuture movement, skipping school to demand that their governments take action against climate change. And on Friday March 15th, these young people will take things a step further—joining together across more than 90 countries and 1,200 cities in the Youth Climate Strike. Sarah Kaplan, science reporter for the Washington Post, reports live from the scene of one of those stikes in Manhattan’s Columbus Circle. Plus, Ira speaks with Isabella Fallahi, Youth Climate Strike organizer and Varshini Prakash, executive director and co-founder of the Sunrise Movement about what’s inspiring this current moment of youth-led activism. Each year, approximately 1,800 high school science students take part in the Regeneron Science Talent Search (Regeneron STS), a program of Society for Science & the Public. This year’s projects ranged from studying the viscosity of molten lava to investigating more fuel efficient airplane designs to creating a computer model to predict refugee migrations. Senior Samuel Weissman analyzed the genetic makeup of two HIV patients, and senior Ana Humphrey created a math model to look for exoplanets. Ira talks with them about their winning projects. As we can all attest, climate change is creating more fluctuating temperatures. Normally, snowflakes form high up in the atmosphere, and crystallize into their pretty structures as they pass through cold layers of air. But with warmer temperatures, snowflakes can partially melt on their way down. There’s more water in the air these days, and it acts like a glue that can glom onto the snowflakes, covering them with little ice pellets. Add in the wind and the snowflakes can smash together, turning into mega snowflakes. To add insult to injury, after these snowflakes land they melt faster because they’re less able to reflect light. This has serious implications for flooding and hydrology as well as spring vegetation. When melting occurs normally, the nutrients in the snowpack are absorbed into the soil. Not so when it melts away really fast.

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, we'll talk with some standout teens from this year's Regener on Science Talent Search.

0:08.7

But first, this week's air safety regulators around the world grounded Boeing's 737 max eight jets in the wake of a deadly crash in Ethiopia.

0:19.7

The cause of that crash is still unknown. But the behavior

0:23.4

of the aircraft in its final minutes was strikingly similar to that of another 737 max,

0:29.8

which crashed last October in Indonesia. Maggie Kerth Baker, a senior science reporter at 538,

0:36.4

is with me to talk about that and other selected subjects in science this week.

0:41.5

Welcome back, Maggie.

0:43.0

Hi, thanks for having me.

0:44.5

You're welcome.

0:45.3

So, Phyllis, what do investigators now know so far about this most recent crash?

0:50.8

Well, we know one thing that it's definitely a big deal to have two crashes of the same

0:55.6

type of plane in close succession, you know, just two years after the model first flew. So to give

1:00.1

you some context on that, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which first flew in 2009, has never had a

1:07.0

fatality, which is what's drawing a lot of attention to this 737 max.

1:11.4

You know, it matters a lot that it's crashed twice in such close timing.

1:17.4

And is this a problem with the plane or how it's being flown?

1:22.6

So based on what we know about that Indonesia accident, it sounds like it might be a little bit of both, kind of a chain reaction of problems.

1:32.3

So the 737 Max was a redesign of an older airplane that was intended to be more fuel efficient.

1:39.3

And part of how they did that was getting these different engines, which were a little bit bigger, so the designers put them further forward on the wing, and that has a tendency to destabilize the aircraft in certain

1:49.2

situations. So then Boeing has this plane preloaded with software that automatically corrects the

1:55.8

plane's pitch when it needs to. But data from this previous crash last year suggests that

2:00.6

sensors that tell the plane when it needs to turn that correction from this previous crash last year suggests that sensors that tell the

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