This is w. When p.r. Connecticut's public media source for news and ideas w when p.r. And w. One p.r. H.d. One merit in at 90.5 w p k t w h d one Norwich at 89 point one. F.m. Stamford at 88.5 w.r.i. Southampton at 91.3 and w. When p.r. Dot org You're listening to n.p.r. I'm David or oh shit the time is 2 o'clock. Days are shorter nights are colder and we're waving a 2017 in the rearview mirror from p.r.i. I'm Ira Flatow and this says Science Friday. Gets our 2017 year in review we take a look back at the science that made this year great Dan less great has seen his final moments our 1st look at colliding neutron stars science entered the political arena with controversial appointments to government agencies and the planned end of our role in the Paris climate accord it was a big year for big point self driving cars and the future of quantum computing and the great American eclipse blaze the path from coast to coast. Wrapping up this year in Science plus some of your favorite stories after this. Live from n.p.r. News in Washington I'm Lori Lunden in New York City a fire in an apartment building in the Bronx has killed 12 people including 4 children Jessica Gould of member station w n y c reports officials are calling this a tragic accident New York City fire commissioner Daniel Nye Grose has a 3 and a half year old boy it was playing with burners on the stove when the fire started his mother ran out of their apartment with her children but left the front door open Magro says the fire then spread up the stairway like a chimney there are 25 apartments in the walkup building and 20 people had to be rescued from the fire escapes officials are urging parents to monitor young children any time they're in the kitchen and in the case of fire always close the door for n.p.r. News I'm Jessica Gould in the Bronx in this end of it in his end of the Year address to the nation Spanish prime minister Marianna will Coy's says he intends to call the 1st session for the new regional Catalan parliament in January it's the 1st step in reinstating local government after Madrid fired the old government for illegally declaring independence the B.B.C.'s Daniel Eberhard reports requires says it's absurd to think the Catalan leader who is currently in self-imposed exile in Belgium will try to lead a new regional government from abroad Mariano Rajoy has been facing an uncomfortable dilemma since recent regional elections that he's government cooling Catalonia using emergency powers separatist parties reemerged with the majority and come as push them on heads the biggest of them Mr Bush to moan insists he wants to return to Spain to take up his old role but if there's no agreement that Spain's traditionally will drop the investigation he too faces a predicament will he turn up to face arrest try to run a government from abroad or step aside the B.B.C.'s Daniel Eberhard Liberians are celebrating the Resound ing presidential election victory of one. Time soccer star George George Weah who defeated the incumbent vice president and P.R.'s Ofeibea Quest Archon reports we are now faces the challenges of reviving Liberia's battered economy and delivering on his election pledges George Weah has posted a tweet saying change is on and especially young unemployed Liberians are hungry for change jobs development and economic prosperity we grew up poor in the shantytowns around Liberia's capital Monrovia and has made it big 1st as a global soccer striker and now in his 2nd bid for the top job as president his supporters say the hero is modest honest generous and able and that we as critics who say he lacks experience and polish should give him a chance because he's a natural team leader who listens and consults or said the actress talked to n.p.r. News Dhaka the Dow down 41 points this is n.p.r. . People in the northern plains may see their last above 0 temperatures of the year today a frigid air masses dropping from Canada and creating dangerously cold conditions for the weekend South Dakota Public Broadcasting's Carrie Ellen Bowl reports wind chill advisories and warnings cover much of the door there New us today Aberdeen South Dakota b.t.r. Well it just really why it's says once cold conditions come to the area they'll hang around for a while we're looking for wind chills anywhere from minus $25.00 to minus 40 across much of the area beginning night a little bit after midnight. And continuing through the morning tomorrow officials say travel will become dangerous in the Dakotas once the brutal cold arrives a winter storm warning extends from Montana into Washington state for n.p.r. News uncurable in Vermillion South Dakota New York's Times Square New Year's Eve celebration will be one of the coldest in years and police are promising it will also have a bigger security detail than ever before officials say there are no specific threats but given recent deadly attacks they are taking no chances spectators braving the cold will have to go through metal detectors at one of a dozen access points the area around Times Square will also be sealed off with cement blocks and sanitation trucks filled with sand to stop a potential vehicle attack I'm Lori London n.p.r. News in Washington support for n.p.r. Comes from the n.p.r. Wine club offering wines from around the world with stories behind each one and bottles inspired by a favorite n.p.r. Shows available to adults 21 Years or Older learn more at n.p.r. One club dot org and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. W. N.p.r. News reports are made possible by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven ski sundown and charter Oaks state college online graduate studies lesson for n.p.r. News reports on Morning Edition and All Things Considered. This is Science Friday I'm Ira Flatow the days trickle down to a precious few as the old song says 2017 is slipping away but a lot has happened this year you think 3 major hurricanes wildfires in California plans to pull out of the Paris claimed accords Saturn in Jupiter posed for their close ups and how about those colliding neutron stars and their gravitational waves big coin became ause hold name along with black chain technology we're editing genes to save lives and perhaps the advent of the year that total solar eclipse 'd 'd 'd 'd. I know. Today you had it you had to be there for that one which I was it was really some site we're going to review the highlights in the world of science technology medicine nature and joining me an August panel of journalists to round up the news with us every week let me introduce them right Mandelbaum science writer Gizmodo Amy No good news editor for the i triple e. Spectrum Rachel Feldman science editor at Popular Science welcome all of you having us yeah thanks so much you're welcome we won't be taking calls today but we already asked you to weigh in on your favorite science story of 2017 will be playing your thoughts throughout the hour let me begin that way let's take one thought from grace in San Francisco Her Grace can from San Francisco and a story that has the most to me in 2017 was on cracking the mystery of avian actually it turns out in general the better the flyer a bird is the more political or asymmetrical I didn't raise I personally grew out of an armature burger for me this has just been so smart as far as formulating really encourages your bird and to warm. Well in a different way it's amazing when people get excited about what starts my story I think that's a fantastic story I'm with her on that one yeah let's talk about last year but it began with the discovery of gravitational waves then this year we use them to learn something about the neutron stars Rachel Yeah it was a really exciting year for gravitational waves to me because the Lego observatory really became an observatory in till last year it was the detector trying to detect gravitational waves and now it detects them all the time I think it had its 3rd black hole merger announced in June and then Virgo which is another facility in Italy came online which was very exciting because with the 2 Lego facilities in Virgo they can triangulate they can do all of this exciting stuff and then a few months ago they detected a neutron star which is different from a black hole this very dense thing it only weighs a little bit more than our sun but it is crammed into like 12 miles across like the length of Manhattan and so it just totally different from the behavior of matter that we think about it day to day basis and using these 3 gravitational wave detectors they were able to find this neutron star you know look at it with more telescopes than have ever been any think basically. And determine a bunch of cool things about neutron stars and what they are and what they do right now you. Pressed by this story oh my god it was amazing I think that for me just the discovery of where a lot of the heavy elements in our universe come from you know gold and that was a very large number yeah yeah and in fact when we asked our listeners for their favorites we got the most cones about this story believe it or not here's here's Justin in Boise Idaho enthusing about colliding neutron stars. My name's Justin I'm from Boise Idaho the science story that mattered most to me this year was when scientists were sacked 2 neutron stars right in the other through the use of gravitational waves sectors not only or because the gravitational waves sector or the Noble Prize this year but also because we were able to see it for the 1st time so we're able to quantify what we were accessing refused gravitational waves or visible light actually effect by that and now we know it all comes from culture. Yeah I think that's probably got the most press of anything that's where the oil and gold and a lot of gold they go in there we're talking about right and I think though the collision produced material that is $600.00 times more the mass of earth that sounds that's just the gargantuan amount of material coming out of this collision and the actual detection of and believe only lasted about 100 seconds so you can learn just so much from the is the event once you've built is very Tories and they're functioning as we'd hoped right when gravitational waves came up last year everyone was celebrating the proof of something Einstein had long predicted and we had another discovery like that this year didn't we Yeah and this one is interesting because it does use Einstein's theory of general to me but Einstein in self said of course there's no hope of observing this phenomenon directly which is being able to measure the mass of an individual star using gravitational lensing So the thing about Gravity is that it changes the shape of space itself and thus when you know a massive thing passes in front of a bright thing it can actually shift the light and cause a sort of lensing effect now scientists were actually able to measure the mass of white dwarf stars stying to over $51.00 be using this gravitational lensing a fact and just a little bit of simple math actually so I thought it was pretty cool to do that so I said this would happen his theory said this would have been but we could never prove it and he was just yeah it was just such a specific and we were requires so much much in the way of persuasion that he thought we just never happen and. Again Nope observing it directly but he was wrong by printing right. A long anticipated Jane iceberg off. Do you remember that oh yeah I remember yes so in Antarctica this. Giant ice shelf broke off it was bigger than Delaware I think and you know. For a coffin and article all the time they you know it's kind of kava way but people were really anticipating and see because it was going to be a big one and it was happening very quickly it seems that these kinds of calving events are Excel aerated and surprisingly due to global warming you know the water is warmer down there the warmest period of the year is getting longer so the time at which these ice shelves are really vulnerable is becoming you know more of the year so it wasn't surprising that it broke off and you know on the one hand something like this breaking off doesn't immediately raise the sea level because it was already ice that was floating in the sea you know like having an ice cube and glass of water was already there but what it does is it leaves the ice that used to be you know within the and Arctic shelf and edge so you know it means that now this is new ice that can break off and melt into the sea and raise it so it's not great and scientists are still kind of figuring out just how much climate change is accelerating these kinds of events and speaking of climate change we we had all these natural disasters 3 major hurricanes we have these wildfires that are so raging out of control in parts of the West can we draw any clear line between those warm Well you know it's interesting because. A lot of people get very upset if they do not believe in climate change if you connect hurricanes and things that we think of as natural but hurricanes are definitely getting worse because of climate change you know climate change doesn't cause hurricanes but hurricanes are fed by warm water so if the ocean is warmer a hurricane becomes more powerful the other thing is that as we saw a lot this year storm surges are really the thing you have to worry about as a cause of death during a hurricane so that's when the sea level rises and off. You flood an area and if this if you level is already higher because of climate change which it is then storm surges are going to be worse so there are very quantifiable ways that climate change is making these so-called natural disasters worse even if it's not causing any You're nodding your head about yeah even the amount of water that the air going to hold increases with the temperature of the air itself and there have been some analyses that are now started to come out through the end of the year about hurricane Harvey in particular that was the hurricane level for that Houston and a couple of different counties are trying to measure you know what's the difference and the amount of rainfall because Houston was absolutely inundated with rainfall during that those couple of days you know what's the difference in the amount of rainfall in this hurricane than we would have expected from a hurricane if the climate were not warming in the way that we know it to be and they have shown that there's 15 to 38 percent higher rainfall which was what she was much higher than even scientists expected in that storm as a result of climate change in quite a year for the climate in general but also the way climate is treated politically Yes I mean it's been interesting to see some of these natural disasters I mean there are there have been deaths attributed to all of these storms hurricane or my Hurricane Maria hurricane Harvey throughout the United States I mean it's the wildfires in California are very dramatic damage happening there and yet there does seem to be this disconnect I mean the amount of public funding available for scientific research some of the very basic research that happens at the National Institutes of Health for example has been jeopardized by the new administration and if I mean there were the March for science is this year I mean scientists really got organized in a big way this year in a way that we might not have seen in quite a long time you know really rallying behind these issues and ensuring that they continue to get you know the funding in the support from the public that they need in order to do their jobs in fact the interaction of politics and science subset of quite a few of our listeners who called. In about the Paris climate of course here's one Iris John McCormack in Park City Utah our biggest clients who are timid this year was for a prescription drug or McCourt I think in your head we're not express. This to be good stewards of the pivotal moment have we resolved any arguments about whether the political activism is appropriate or healthy role for scientists I mean I mean the thing that I think sticks out to me is the idea that while science shouldn't be partisan it is absolutely political because it should inform policy so to me seeing scientists get activated and you know and and start to really insist that you know the government listen to basic reason in fact is really important and I don't think it should be controversial at all but I know that there are people who who disagree on this could present a slice scientists have for generations and I can bet I can you know you can point to Einstein you know signing a letter to Roosevelt. I mean in the technology sector we've actually seen a lot of major tech companies take on what they see as fundamental workforce issues that are highly political issues so this includes immigration access to be says for their skilled workers the people that they need to create the products and services that we use and I think this year more than years past we've actually seen these companies like Apple and Google and Facebook start to step up and speak out on these issues that people may not have expected to hear from them on when to take a break and when we come back more of the top science stories from 2017 by are already trying to Ryan and to Bob I mean our Jim Bridger Feltman and we're not taking your calls but you can leave us message on our website at Science Friday dot com The Science Friday year in review Stay with us. This is Science Friday from p.r.i. . Damon bolt he creates cocktails at his Grand Army bar in New York and he made one for us by request it was stirred not shaken for me martinis or something very clean and also slightly reflective you know it's something you can step on you don't really slam it I'm Ari Shapiro a new cocktail for the New Year this afternoon on All Things Considered from n.p.r. News. Listen today and for support comes from Connecticut Acura dealers. In a quest to stay sane through the endlessly bad news cycle that was 2017 we had o.t.m. Turned our gaze internally in words mindfulness meditation is more analytical then people appreciate that it's a way of learning to step back and analyze their thoughts inside your head Don't miss this week's On the media from w i n y c. Listen Saturday morning at 6. This is Science Friday I'm Ira Flatow It's our 2017 year in review and we're talking everything from colliding neutron stars to big cooling when a year it's had We'll get into that a little bit and we asked all of you to call in with your favorite stories and you did not disappoint boy did we get calls like this one from Florida hi Ira My name is Abby to those who have Florida and I have to say I love the science story when you were interviewing that's who side are experts I learned more about spiders and got all excited about spiders and side is that I think they're really cool to have around the house that it's Ok if you haven't got it by Thank you great thank you for your past here to talk more about the stories that stood out to them this year my guests Ryan Mandelbaum science writer at the Gizmodo Amy Nora German news editor for the Tripoli's spectrum Rachel Feldman science editor at Popular Science and Rachel one of our favorite stories of the year where sort of bittersweet is the end of the Cassini mission yes Santa did you know a little tweeting I had more than a little to say when I was very upset I think a lot of people had a lot of strong feelings about Kiss theni from a practical standpoint it was just a fantastic mission we got tons of amazing data you know outlived its lifespan and it taught us about you know not just Saturn but the moons around it some of which we may soon be visiting to look for life yeah well it is very sad that you know seeing is God it's amazing what kind of data they're still getting and still analyzing from it I mean just recently there were new results that actually showed that the shadow of Saturn's rings affected the charges sort of the particles in its i honest fear so there's still some cool Cassini stuff you know it's sort of got its swan song now Oh totally I mean you know having the bro bought it sell. Parrish obviously you know a little tough for people but it's true that you know there are scientists who are now well into their careers who have spent their whole careers on Cassini and could easily spend the rest of their careers on data from Cassini So it's true that the story isn't over we just had to say goodbye to the actual spacecraft in fact Cassini hit home for a lot of folks like O'Reilly who called it. Years old and I think they will pay and. The moment the final moments of Concini and is really happening you know what my mom flat file why bobbing for school and island become a science test when I grow up I was just so amazed it was just so amazing to see me the final moment Oh Oh Neal thank thrown. Circling and orbiting Saturn rings and I think that when I think you know her. I know thank you for calling Rosalie I mean like oh my gosh it's like she's just based around. My back and my computer is Saturn now because of how beautiful some of those pictures were so I totally get it and I think sort of a sad Cody to all of this is that we really don't really have any missions coming up like the Cassini mission Yeah I mean you know nothing like nothing like you see me it's true that there are robots out there who are still collecting data New Horizons is going to be visiting its next target almost exactly 2 years no a year from now it's going to be like New Year's Day $21000.00. Very forgot what year it is that. When we also have those rovers 14 years yeah I mean a 3 month tour you know and when the 4th year you know when opportunity dies I'm not going to be Ok I think. The Mars rovers are definitely starting to show their age you know we don't really have any banner probes like to see me coming for a while we do have the Europa probe that's maybe going to launch in 2020 so that will be pretty exciting but not landing on the surface until I think they're talking about maybe a mission in 2031 so it's true that after like Rosetta and new horizons and and and Cassini is finale we had a really busy couple of years and now it's going to be a little slower or certainly and we're certainly closer to home seeing a lot of movement and progress on being able to image our own earth more accurately and more frequently so we're seeing a lot of kind of low Earth orbit and near earth orbit satellites being launched by companies as well so that's that's a positive and I think you know as satellites get you know smaller and cheaper to launch are going to can you see that as well and talking about the moon continuing to talk. About that for a moment I think I would rate this is the biggest event you know national event of the year was the the total solar eclipse and if you thought the eclipse was the best thing she experienced all year I think the poorest science story of the year was the crest that we're beyond you know for. The entire planet Sadar there all the people all part of craft science behind me craft all the science experiments going on with the crap our. People ride home or. Trying to do you know you know I was I was in Nashville for the eclipse Unfortunately I was there outside it was a beautiful day and then at 120 you know just before just like 115 right before totality a big cloud window right in front of the sun you know I still saw it was incredible you can see the 3 sixty's sunset and all of the animals started to you know act as if the sun was going down so it was a really incredible experience otherwise but I'm looking forward to the next one because I'm going to go to the next one to go to the next one here in the one that you can see in South America if I have South American Morning in the next one here Rachel you went to the clubs Yeah and I wasn't going to I had made plans and then you know my my boyfriend had friends in St Louis more like Ok I guess we'll just go even though the viewing conditions aren't supposed to be great in St Louis and we could think the most totality we could get was like barely a minute but it was amazing and it ended up being perfect we had a perfect view of the eclipse I'd never seen a total eclipse before and I did not expect it to be as amazing as it was and I definitely like an eclipse chaser now it's what I do and I need to take out another one and you get like this this was my 1st total solar eclipse also and it was like in a movie it was exactly like people said it would be. And it was like you know suddenly the sun is there it's 99 percent and when it gets to 100 totality it's like somebody changed the slide you know there's light why don't we just popped out and it was sort of you know so let's talk about us something really hot that ended spike you know this year and that is the big coin do you understand what a big point I was talking to. You I think it could last in a nutshell what a big corner you yeah I mean it's funny because it really came back in a big way this year I think most people if they had heard of Bitcoin before twenty's that would you know maybe would have been back when it very 1st launch like almost a decade ago but this year all of us thought and it was back in the spotlight this crypto currency so a virtual currency that you can trade and spend much like you can you know your u.s. Dollars or other currency that you might have in your pocket it's all built on this interesting data architecture this thing called the block chain which is also really heating up in 2017 and that's largely or arguably part of the reason that equate itself has gotten so much attention as well as the overall blocked chain that it's built on is really starting to go mainstream or almost mainstream and this block chain is basically a list of transactions that's shared between many different kinds of people on their computers rather than controlled by you know a central authority like a bank and the way that the transactions the list of transactions is updated is through these algorithms that all these computers do at once in order to keep it more or less hack proof and there's been so much speculation all year about what is it going to do next and then all these other cryptocurrency It's like ether like coin you know they're also kind of in the same situation where we could see them go up like beginning of the year big question was under a $1000.00 by October it had fit and it hit $5000.00 and everyone wants to know where it's going to go next and it's really kind of a fool's game to try to guess but of course that's you know that's the big question but block change which Bitcoin is based on is big right that whole yes techno. Banks Mastercard people like anybody who handles money absolutely really the best way to think about it is actually as a platform rather than a currency I think that's the way that most people probably end up using it and I understand that's even more confusing to David that way but alternately you're seeing a lot of big companies get serious about investing in a blocked chain developers they are hiring blocking consultants there's like this entire mini economy now running on helping major companies get an on block chain technology because it can do things like automatically execute contracts they can organize data in interesting ways it can make trades in exchange of information easier using the cryptic or currencies or the kind of tool to get that this is how I know it's important because I hear people on the subway talk a competitor I think that's really no sign that you know Flutie it's kind of hit mainstream I mean one of the apps that you can use to trade quite as gotten to the top of the Apple store this year because people have gotten so into trading it and it's obviously as an investment it's still a very risky proposition for the average person speaking of risky Here's one that I quite can't get to wrap my head around something we've talked about to write and maybe you can help me we're talking about quantum computers are they finally ready for prime time so a quantum computer is essentially a machine that can do computations with the rules of quantum mechanics in mind a regular computer is built on the architecture of bits which is essentially there's billions of zeroes and ones that do the calculations whereas a quantum computer is a system that can do those calculations with zeroes and ones simultaneously using the idea of quantum superposition quantum entanglement in quantum interference so no I would say that this was been a really big year in quantum computing there's been a number of different architectures that can actually be these cubits actually do this you know the superposition However that doesn't mean that we're at a place where a quantum computer can beat a regular computer you know at its own job but I think that this year is this year . In a big one next year we need probably hear some really big quantum computing stories from maybe Google i.b.m. There's a couple of other smaller companies that are coming up now but it'll probably be you know maybe 5 to 10 years before businesses are really starting to use it and then maybe 20 to 30 years before you're seeing some of the biggest concerns which are like breaking up public key encryption that a lot of people are talking about I mean I know you follow it also so yeah the key phrase to listen to and future coverage will believe at that point of quantum slick supremacy which is what all these companies including Google and i.b.m. And all of them trying to kind of inch closer toward me to superintend like a story or if they want to quantum advantages then they better than we can defeat our quantum theory but basically it means that we you know that they've been able to demonstrate that a quantum computer can actually perform tasks better than a classic computer and we're still kind of not at that point but getting closer that's what all these major companies are interested in as they build these you know 4900 systems and 50 cubits simulators I guess if you talk about quantum computers you can be right and wrong at the same time I'm Ira Flatow this is Science Friday from p.r.i. Public Radio International. Talking about the year in review with my guests Ryan Mandelbaum science writer at Gizmodo and you know your news editor at the police spectrum Rachel Feldman science editor at Popular Science they've been here all year talking about their stuff and we're going to review some more of it I want to let you move on Rachel to health research we saw some big advances for Gene immunotherapies Stanley Yeah there were a couple stories that really stood out to me that the post really came out in the latter half of the year so people started talking about car t. Which finally got f.d.a. Approval and it's a and I mean a therapy that basically takes patients t. Cells then doctors scientists engineer them to have these certain antigen receptors then they use them into a patient's body and those t. Cells are then basically program to fight off a specific kind of cancer cell in a way that normal t. Cells just just can do and it's still you know it's a last ditch treatment for this very specific kind of leukemia that mostly effects children but it has successfully treated a few kids and in theory it works for life you know there was 11 of the studies that helped to get f.d.a. Approval they infused a ton of t. Cells I don't remember if it was 10000 or 100000 or in the millions but a lot of t. Cells and it took about a month for it to start working and then suddenly it worked and when they kind of trace back you know genetic lineage of the t. Cells that were now propagated in the body it had just been one of the engineered t. Cells that survived but it had just replicated so prolifically that it had put this child into remission another couple studies came out about using it and I want to say a kind of non hunch this lymphoma definitely a kind of lymphoma again for patients with no. Other options and it showed that it can work really well but it can also not work at all and can also cause a huge side of can reaction that is life threatening for the rest of the downside is that right yeah when you amp up the immune response that can obviously cause a fatal immune response you know our immune systems are totally capable of killing us than they do frequently so it's not exactly ready to replace chemotherapy and radiation but it is really promising Yeah we don't need to use crisper for this you know and you know there is some research some researchers think that crisper could be a faster easier way to accomplish this kind of gene therapy but you know Chris because error rate is still pretty high it's a tool that in theory is way faster and cheaper than all other team editing but there are a lot of bugs to work out there was just a story I read at the end of the year coming out about crisper a new kind of crisper being able to. Not have to cut the d.n.a. Get it to express itself without actually having to cut it out yeah no I mean it has definitely been an exciting year for crisper as well but I think you know a lot of people working on immunotherapy are you know not quite ready to to factor crisper into it yet there was another really cool immunotherapy story actually where this child with a genetic condition that basically makes your your skin really sceptical to infection and abrasion he was close to death and they did something they've done on small patches of skin before where they they basically took skin cells genetically engineer them to be free of this condition and then basically disc a skin graft using those engineers skin cells and they did it on 80 percent of his body to place all of the affected skin and it worked so that in is just new healthy skin and it's his own so there's not a fear of rejection you know what we'll have to see if it works as. Well it seems to have worked but you know it was one of those moments where therapy really seems to be groundbreaking and kind of miraculous which is so rare writing about the medical world that that was a really cool story to me a great way to tell a descent to the break where you were going to take a break and after the break we're going to come back with more stories from the 2017 to highlight reel plus some of our favorite Science Friday guests from that here and if you're curious about the stories and projects that caught the fancy of the cipher right team some of them weighty some of them just plain fun you can see our offices 2017 Hall of Fame on our Web site visit Science Friday dot com slash staff picks see what we like in the office on Science Friday dot com slash staff picks We'll be back after the break with Ryan Mandel Bob science writer Gizmodo Amy North German news editor at the Tripoli spectrum Rachel Feldman science editor at Popular Science its Field Science Friday here in review and Science Friday from n.p.r. . This is Science Friday from p.r.i. Support for Science Friday comes from Draper Draper's team of engineers biologists developers physicists and astronauts work together to expand the horizon of what's possible pursuing solutions to the world's challenges Draper engineering possibilities and by Burlington stores committed to helping our communities now through January 22nd Burlington is collecting new or gently warm coats so people across America. Can stay warm this winter listeners can help Burlington stores dot com support for this program also comes from the Winston Foundation and from the Alfred p. Sloan Foundation working to enhance public understanding of science technology and economics in the modern world and by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for more information please visit more dot org. On the next Radiolab I know you don't want me to going to do this anyway the trick of all tricks that was just no boundaries for her never been done by anyone anyone ever like oh my god only he's actually doing this at the time medical science said if you achieve term of loss of your dog feel. Free. I think that's in the Next Radio Lab. Join us Saturday afternoon at 3. I'm Guy Raz next time on the Ted Radio Hour for the past few centuries we have defined beauty not just as healthy and symmetry but also as tall slender figures and white skin beauty the good the bad the ugly of it that's next time of the Ted Radio Hour from n.p.r. . Join us Sunday afternoon at 4. Bit coins the digital currency has been hard to ignore like there's been endless speculation about the skyrocketing value. For its founders fans and future what's the point of recording. Listen to the inquiry from the b.b.c. World Service Sunday night at 7. This is Science Friday I'm Ira Flatow in case you're just joining us we're talking this hour about the top scientists Tori's from 2017 and we've asked you to tell us what yours were and here's a listener Jason prof from Houston Texas definitely sort of any of the artists was the redefined kilogram and terms of actual fundamental constants and not just arbitrary i agreed upon amounts but I started out as a physics major It is really dollars needed at things like time and length so we're clearly defined based on the universal constants parts now that's just something we have agreed to. This year that is that if I only resolved now a lot of people were happy for that one and before we go back to the stories we want to throw out their own to the hundreds Yeah yeah hundreds of scientists and other experts who joined us on the air this year we could name you all right now we would get instead here's something a little more creative a short selection of favorite moments from 2017. Find the scenes of all this is Carla Dove a forensic nephrologist program manager of the feather identification lab at the Smithsonian here in Washington welcome to Science Friday thank you so much for having me before everybody does it let me ask you about yes that's my name. You know my mom gave me this age appropriate non-kosher certified chemistry set back in the day getting to blow up you know and I makes use to chemicals together Carol it was but you know created this explosion I burned her carpet she ran in the room and you know I got a spanking but my brain was activated to science because I was a scientist at that point and it was one of those moments where you know I became a chemistry major in college because of that one experience the moment my life they have I think which is kind of like if I know right so they can smell if they spray in the water if they think there's a game to be had then they'll let out their proposed this which is like a. On the tip of the tongue is a harpoon which they'll then inject into the fish and then they open their mouth rostrum really wide and swallow and Gulf the whole thing so it's not dead but it's going into what we called. Sometimes And then you get swallowed whole the worst death you can imagine. To find. That it is. When you think about it at 10 and. On top of each other but then the whole thing will just. It's kind of. Over I think one reason that many people have put off math is that that they think they don't understand it but none of us really understand honestly we're just trying to understand it more all the time and being confused doesn't mean that we're not good I think a lot of people. Feel confused they go I'm no good at math but actually being the core of. What you asked for then you've really just illustrated why it is so hard to have computers understand what we really want. There is so much that is unknown in this field but I do believe that just as Craig Venter and David Cullen suggested that whereas the 20th century had been the century a physics with all of these fantastic breakthroughs and achievements the 21st century was going to be the century of biology and course they were talking about General Mixon I think actually the 21st century is going to be the century of biology on Earth and beyond I think there is a real opportunity in this coming century to discover a life beyond earth. How many of those voices could you recognise I'll tell you who was on here Carla del Leland Melvin Randy Holford Karen Chen David who Eugenia Chang Lydia via camera Max Tegmark and Jill Tarter wound up with their last comment and thanks to all of them and our great guests who joined us and 2017 and thanks to our producer Katie Hyla who put that montage together I want to bring back our expert panel to wrap up our review of 2017 what will go down as the stories that we should remember from this year Ryan man the bomb science writer it gives mo. No I mean your German news editor for I triple e. Spectrum and Rachel Feldman science editor at Popular Science and right let me begin the final discussion with. I know you know you've been following Cern the news out of Cern this year and while some people have been down on particle physics you think there's some promising news tell us why so I know that I think people have really had their eye on supersymmetry this year and they're really worried that they won't find it but one of the experiments people don't talk about quite as much l h c b has had some really interesting results this year no 5 sigma discoveries yet but there are a couple with like the $2.00 to $2.00 sigma range sort of bombs that are coming from the decay of a particle called the The b. Meson particle and if you don't know there might be another particle there and then also discovered a new Berry on which is an arrangement of 3 corks but this period was really special it's called exceed double charm double judge to pretty awesome tell you I know why is that awesome when you say why is you know people say wow that's a nice technical term but you seem to be into it as we used to say I just saw so much cool theory paper as they came out of this one particle because it had to really heavy corks in it you know your protons they have just light quartz the ups and the down court same thing with neutrons but this just really wacky particle and some of the theories that came out of it was per haps there could be some sort of Cork fusion in the way that we have fusion with hydrogen or maybe there are these particles with 4 corks called Touch for corks I mean just this one particle got a lot of theorists really thinking a lot so keep your eyes on l h c b next year they might have results are we going to get any closer to finding a dark matter Parker So that's a little different as far as dark matter goes you may have heard that we're looking right now for a particle called the weakly interacting massive particle or wimp and the idea behind a wimp is. That is sort of in this Goldilocks mass that people think they'd find it but they have these huge vats of liquid Xenon underground that have yet to actually find one of these wind particles they are just releasing their 1st results so we're not really there to make a conclusion yet but next year people might be a little concerned so they are looking for some other potential options like strongly interacting massive particles or simps. What do you think is this just hopeful I mean they're really exciting experiments I think we really haven't been able to ask or try to answer these questions in this way ever before so I'm just kind of looking forward to the results and hearing more and then in the coming year Rachel it's always 20 years away. I mean you know I I think it's like reasonable to hope that dark matter will get figured out in the next lifetime I think guessing more specifically than that is that is probably a little foolhardy at this point there are a lot of like irons in the fire that could work but nothing that's like Oh yeah 5 years away dark energy should we just forget about it again it's going to figure that out I mean the universe is expanding in the expansion the universe is accelerating so we have to figure that out because as you know right now it looks like 70 something percent of the universe is mass energy is just weird. We're not there yet with dark energy we know it's happening and we're real still trying to figure all these things out and a lot of physicists are thinking about it but it's unlikely that somebody is going to just have one eureka moment with one paper that ties them together say maybe we need new physics whatever that mean you know that Einstein's theory of general to be has been pretty bulletproof for the past since when he made it up so I mean it's really been tough to find to find a real weakness in that theory and a lot of people are testing and trying but have yet to actually to break it so breaking Einstein's theory of relativity might be that you know sort of. Hardy to 115 I think was the day let's move to self driving cars we see the dancers in health care quantum computing but as we heard from Max take Mark's clip earlier what about those self driving cars are they 2030 years away Oh I closer I'm looking forward to this because I mean humans aren't very good at driving cars you believe in doing it for a like you know about a century there are many many traffic accidents like cars fatalities or injuries every single year and the really big idea behind self driving cars is that it could eliminate traffic fatalities and injuries which would be phenomenal and there have been some important progress points made this year there are major companies invested in this on the car side and on the technology side so you have the bit which is the parent company of Google also running a company called away mo that's invested and self driving cars they've actually said that they're going to skip level 3 autonomy which is the level at which Tesla and audio are currently operating and that requires some to be in the driver's seat ready to take over the car if something goes awry plans to skip that and go straight to level 4 driving autonomy in which you do not need a human sitting in the car they're actually programmed well enough that they're able to navigate in certain weather conditions and in certain pretty much urban environments on their own and they're hoping to launch this plan in a lot less than the Phoenix area and early 2018 so these are pretty big milestones there's a lot of money being put into this the technology on the car itself the cameras the Lidar they're all getting better and you know their projections for 2040 to 2100 actually have Level 5 driving cars which is the thing we all dream about any road any conditions in the urban or rural area the car can just you know handle everything on its own I don't know when that's going to happen but I'm hopeful and confident that these companies will be able to figure this challenge out an outcast actually improve public safety quite a bit but you have also there. Ethical questions there is even software questions Rachel I mean the car is going to get somebody to decide whether you're going to be one of the car going to get hurt or the pedestrian Yeah I mean a lot of people talk about like you know how should solve driving deal with the trolley problem you know do you hit one person hit 5 people sort of them to hit somebody who wasn't even on the road at the time but I had to think of it like cell timing cars themselves are kind of like a broader Charlie problem I hate philosophy I'm sorry but I think people assume this level of risk when they get into a car and drive it and feel like they're in control of that risk because they're the ones driving and if we have the self driving cars the question is will we accept any number of accidents from self driving cars or will we you know think that that's an unacceptable risk because this is a software that some corporation created and said was going to be safe so I think that question of you know whether people are willing to hand over that assumed risk to an ai is a really big hurdle to actually getting these things adopted I'm Ira Flatow this is Science Friday from n.p.r. I Public Radio International. Let's wrap things up and let's talk about the what else do you want to remember for 27000 that we haven't talked about wanting to ask you Rachel for work other things happen so one thing that really sticks out for me not exactly a hugely important study but some researchers decided to they were trying to figure out if like the total annihilation of life on earth was possible and you know it's not a perfect study but based on all their calculations card agreed otherwise known as water bears or my personal favorite mosse piglet would survive and if that that would wipe out all other life on Earth and personally I find that very comforting. I think most people it would leave our planet better than they found it no it's not a cockroach to survive it's going to be perfect they really just kids figure out those are happy stories that just write. Well one thing I'm a story I'm interested in following and certainly in the 2018 is this massive hunt for Planet 9 so mining the planet and our solar system back and there was hope that that might have occurred in 2017 it has not yet been confirmed but there are enough lines of inquiry that point to and suggest that this planet exist but are honing in on it using both classical techniques with telescopes and also software techniques actually doing a computational work to mine old images so I'm looking forward to keeping my eye on that story as well we had a major astronomer out about that talking about that and I think he credited us with inspiring him to continue with the research that we had a little mention in a research paper that's fantastic to continue looking for planets I have always one think of the movie from outer space every time I say that but that's another story all right give us your pick Yeah I mean so for next year I will be keeping my eye on quantum computing but I think that a story this year I thought was really cool was. Scientists discovered 5 new homosapien specimens that were pretty far away from the traditional spot in Africa where people sort of paper origin out and they were dated some 100000 years earlier than the origin of humanity so I mean humans have been around a probably longer than we think so I thought that was really amazing a lot of stuff to look forward to follow up on the 2018 I want to thank you all for taking time to be with us today Brian Mann a bomb science writer at Gizmodo Amy nor German news editor for July Tripoli's spectrum Rachel Feldman science editor at Popular Science we will see all of the New Year Oh and one last thing before we go did you know that Google backs up your e-mails on magnetic tape and that librarians are hard at work saving web pages on the Internet you may think that your photos on Facebook or your tweets will last forever but your data is actually not quite that permanent These are just some of the digital dilemmas covered in our new file not found series a 3 part look at the ways data can be lost in a digital dark age and how researchers and archivists are battling to preserve it for the future check it out it's up on our Web site right now at Science Friday dot com slash data that's Science Friday dot com slash data Charles Berquist is our director our senior producer is Christopher entirely at the producers are Alexa Lim Christy Taylor and Katie how are we had technical engineering help today at all here for a marriage cam Sarah Fishman and Jack Horowitz and we are active all week on Facebook Twitter Instagram all social media and you can ask Amazon echoing Google to well I won't say the words because the alternative if you want to listen to Science Friday whatever you'd like to because every day now is Science Friday have a great and happy new year I'm Ira Flatow in the. Support for Science Friday comes from the Union of Concerned Scientists defending science to help protect people's health and safety in these interesting times on the web at u.c.s.f. USA dot org And by Burlington stores committed to helping our communities now through January 22nd Burlington is collecting new or gently warm coats so people across America can stay warm this winter listeners can help Burlington stores dot com support for this program also comes from the Winston Foundation and from the Research Corporation for science advancement nurturing teachers scholars and innovative basic research in the physical sciences at American colleges and universities since 1900 more at rest corp dot org. Our. International. For decades feminist icon Gloria Steinem has been one of America's most important activists but she says she's the wrong person to ask for advice I always ask the turtle. Time Rico Gagliano time for anything Francis Newnam here Gloria tell us why this reptile is so wise and hear our conversation with Oscar winning actress this week on The Dinner Party Download Public Radio's Arts and Leisure section on Friday night at 9 and Saturday at 8. How strange it was 2017 Well let's put it this way began with Tom Hanks guest hosting an n.p.r. News quiz and then it just got weird. Filling in for Mr Hanks and we'll present the strangest funniest and most unpredictable moments from the year that will go down in history technically they all do join us for this week's don't tell me from n.p.r. . Listen Saturday and Sunday mornings a lot of. This is dumped when p.r. Connecticut's public media source for news and ideas when.