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This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. The Trump administration recently proposed a 24% budget cut for NASA, and if it passes, it will be the largest slash to the agency's budget in a single year ever. Their proposal also includes cutting NASA's science budget almost in half and shifting the agency's priorities to sending people to the moon and Mars.
So what's at stake here? Sophie Bushwick, Senior News Editor at New Scientist in New York, is here to break it down and tell us more about this week in science. Sophie, welcome back. Thank you. Let's get right into this. What kinds of cuts... does this budget include? What's on the chopping block here? So this budget would cut major NASA science.
So, for instance, sending robots to other planets, like the rovers on Mars, would be in trouble. There's a mission to bring rocks back from Mars. That would be in trouble. There was a proposed space station around the moon that would be at issue, and closer to Earth, the International Space Station would lose funds to send astronauts there and to have research done. These are like the jewels of the NASA space program, aren't they?
Yes, and there's also the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is sort of considered the next big telescope after the James Webb Space Telescope. that one is almost complete. It's on track to be done soon but this budget proposes removing any support to actually get it into space. So we've spent all this money to send rovers to Mars to collect samples that are waiting there, right? to be picked up.
That's right. You can learn so much by bringing back rock samples from other bodies in space, you know, samples from the moon or from an asteroid. And these Mars rocks could be really, really amazing sources of information for scientists here on Earth. And they're just kind of sitting around waiting for us to bring them back.
so let's be clear if this budget passes it's going to going to fundamentally change nasa right yes this would be a major change in nasa's priorities and like you said the biggest single year cut to its budget but I don't think we all need to be panicking quite yet because the proposed budget has to get through Congress. And in the past, presidents have proposed cutting NASA's budget and Congress has restored it.
Because NASA is a really popular agency, a lot of Americans are interested in science and space exploration, and so it's still possible that these proposed cuts won't necessarily go through. So if these cuts do go through, where does the money go to? So right now the focus is going to be shifting to getting humans to places in space, specifically to the moon and to Mars. That's where it seems like the Trump administration wants NASA to put its priorities.
But it's canceling one of our major space programs to get to the moon, isn't it? Yes, it's canceling missions that are aimed at sending robots to the moon, for example, but the idea is that... NASA should be focusing more on getting astronauts there. And I wonder who might be taking those astronauts there. Well, Elon Musk has expressed that he's interested in sending humans to Mars, in having humans colonize space and starting there.
And so it's possible that a mission to send humans to Mars would be using a SpaceX rocket. In fact, SpaceX is planning to send an uncrewed mission to Mars in 2026. And that would, if they got budgetary support from NASA, I'm sure they would be very pleased with that. All right, we'll have to keep our eyes on that, as you say, see what happens in Congress.
on to other news according to a new study if you live in a big city you might be sinking if you live in a big city you're probably sinking almost you're probably saying yeah researchers looked at almost every U.S. city with a population of 600,000 or more and they found 25 out of 28 are sinking by an average of a couple millimeters a year and sometimes more. Wow, all the big cities you're talking about. Why are they sinking?
So one thing that the researchers pinpointed was groundwater extraction. So when you pull water out of the ground, it doesn't just shift the makeup under the ground, it also shifts what's above it. And in cities where you've got these heavy buildings pressing down, this can create a measurable difference. And then there's also issues with things like, you know, after the last ice age, when the ice retreated and the glaciers pulled back,
our land is still changing in response to that geologic event. So that's playing a role for cities like New York and Washington, D.C., which are near where, you know, used to have glacier cover. But the biggest changes seem to be happening in Texas. Houston is the fastest sinking city out of all of these. About 42% of its land is sinking by a rate of more than five millimeters a year, and some of it is even twice as fast as that.
And one of the issues there is that in Texas, there's a lot of oil and gas extraction from under the ground. So just as groundwater extraction can cause changes, so can that. Well, they do big things in Texas. I guess they sink bigly there also. Yeah, yeah. Everything's bigger in Texas. Right. Well, let's switch gears a little bit, Sophie, because scientists are looking... This I found just...
Crazy. They're looking for hydrogen beneath mountains, right? That's right. Hydrogen would be an amazing energy source because it can burn as fuel without releasing greenhouse gas emissions. And rocks naturally create hydrogen. Certain minerals when they interact with water do. But the problem is they're under the ground and many of them are very, very deep.
But now researchers are saying, look, when mountain rages form, some rock from deep underneath is brought up closer to the surface where it can have this reaction with water and create hydrogen. So maybe under the mountains is where we should be looking for hydrogen. Is there enough hydrogen under there that makes it worthwhile to drill?
We don't know yet. And the other thing is, you know, is there enough there that drilling wouldn't be so bad for the environment that it would be counterproductive? So if the whole point of hydrogen is being clean fuel, we don't want to have this drilling operation that would create enough pollution that it would no longer be clean. Speaking of atoms, physicists... have just snapped the first photos of individual atoms? How do you
How do you do a close-up of an atom? With great difficulty. So in previous times they've imaged atoms but these are the first free-range atoms that they've captured. And the way they did it is they had a cloud of atoms kind of interacting with each other, allowed to move freely, and then they kind of froze it briefly by hitting it with lasers.
and then they hit it with another laser to take the image of those frozen atoms before releasing them again. So that gave them the ability to capture these images. And what did they find out? about the atoms or if anything when they capture the images? Well, different types of atoms behave differently depending on how they interact with each other. So for a kind of particle called a boson where all of the different particles have the same quantum mechanical state.
They saw them behaving as quantum theory predicts, behaving like a wave and bunching together. And so this is a great example of quantum theory being illustrated in a real experimental case. So there's not much practical stuff you can do with this, but it's just... It verifies a theory. Yes, yes. And it's also, it's just a great way to have experimental confirmation of things that are predicted by quantum theory. Yes. That's interesting.
Sophie, let's move on to a new study that incorporates ancient Chinese poetry to study porpoises. You've got to... You gotta tell me about this. This is so cool. So the Yangtze finless porpoise is an endangered species that lives in the Yangtze River, and researchers really want to be able to track its historical distribution. But the problem is your historical records aren't necessarily talking about the porpoises there.
but your poems are. Poems, you know, you can track, you can say the person who wrote this poem lived in this specific area along this specific part of the river, and does their poem mention the porpoises? It turns out more than 700 do, and about half of those poems mentioned where along the river the porpoises were. And that gave the researchers an idea of the porpoises' historical range, which over the past... 1,400 years, it seems to have shrunk by 65%. Wow.
Wow, have scientists used poetry like this before? In some cases, yes. Poetry can preserve a lot of information about an ancient culture, about the animals that were living in, say, ancient Greece. You can learn about that from reading an ancient epic poem. So this is not the first scientific use of poetry. Looking at some of those Grecian urns also. Yes, absolutely. Before we go, I hear you've got a musical quiz for me. What's up with this?
Yeah, I want you to try to identify the musical instrument that is playing this song. Wow. Sounds like an ear hearing test. I did not know. What's playing that song? I give up. That song is being played on the bodies of Cicada. You mean they're teaching the cicadas how to play that song?
No, researchers have transformed cicadas into cyborgs, and they're playing them the way you would play a musical instrument. They basically found a way to control the organs that cicadas use to make noise, called timbal. And you've probably heard them during the summer making a racket outside. Apparently the frequency or the pitch of the sound that the cicada is making, it can be tuned.
by the frequency with which it's flexing this organ called the timble. And researchers basically plugged electrodes into cicadas and controlled the timbles and used them to play music. Are we looking for the first cicada insect band here, you think? This might be, but I think the researchers have suggested that you could use these cyborg loudspeakers to send warning messages during an emergency, but...
I think the researchers were just listening to some cicadas and thought, huh, I'd like to do that. I think you're right. I'm going to go with that, Sophie. Well, I mean, in the past, there's been research to, you know, remote control cockroaches. You can also, you know, turn those into these living cyborgs. So that was also an influence on.
I see the movie. I can see the movie now, Sophie. Thank you for joining us with all this great stuff you bring all the time. My pleasure. I'm always happy to play some cyborg music for you. Sophie Bushwick, Senior News Editor at New Scientist in New York.
Coming up after the break, the Trump administration is pushing for deep sea mining. An ocean geologist tells us what's at stake. If they're going to ravage the bottom of the sea, In this area of the Clarion-Clipperton zone, we are talking about an area equivalent to the size Support for Science Friday comes from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, working to enhance public understanding of science, technology, and economics in the modern world.
President Trump recently signed an executive order to fast-track deep sea mining. That would mean companies could dredge the seafloor to collect the nodules of cobalt, copper, rare earth elements. and other minerals down there which can be used to make things like electronics, solar panels, and wind turbines. After the executive order dropped, a Canadian mining firm called the Metals Company submitted the very first application to mine in international waters.
which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is now considering. This move has sparked a backlash from scientists and environmental groups and raised geopolitical concern. Here to explain is Dr. Sandarm Rulso. marine geologist at the austral university of chile welcome to science friday thank you very much ira and good evening or good morning i don't know what time this will be on the air to all the people who are listening tell me tell me why there's
Such pushback against this. What is the danger about collecting these nodules in deep sea? The major danger, first of all, is they're not renewable. So once you take them out, that's it. Because every single nodule... It grows very slowly, a few millimeters per million years. So right now, the size of the nodules that we collect on average, they have maybe 10 to 20 million years old. So if you collect them, they are gone.
Right now, if you collect a few centimeters, let's say 10 centimeters of the seafloor with the nodules, you are collecting sediments as old as 10,000 years old, because sedimentation rates in that part of the world, after five kilometers of water depth, It's very slow. It's one centimeter every thousand years. So when you remove sediments as old as 10,000 to 20,000 years, you are going to put on the surface of the water in the water column.
All the CO2 who has been stored for 10,000 to 20,000 years old. So that's the major impact. The size of a mine on the deep sea to make some kind of profit, it has to be at least 3000 square kilometers of dredging. And if we do a comparison with land miners, which are not clean either, The biggest open copper pit mine is in Chile, which is Chukicamata, where I'm coming from.
But that mine is only 15 square kilometers, 200 smaller. And you can see this hole from satellites. Can you imagine what will happen on the deep sea? And that is one miner. so if they're going to to ravage the bottom of the sea in this area of the Clarion-Clipperton zone we are talking about an area equivalent to the size of Mongolia. So what are we solving? We are not solving anything. The only thing that we are solving is to make rich a few people like the metal company.
Who is supposed to be in charge of deep-sea mining regulations? It should be in charge of the International Tibet Authority. This is an independent organization. where 169 member states are represented there and they are supposed to govern and deal with the licenses for exploration and exploitation in the international waters.
Since they are not a UN body, they are not vying to respond to the Secretary General in New York, Guterres. They have their own Secretary General. So they are like an independent. They're like, it's a very murky water. Unfortunately, the United States they never ratified this UN clause so they can do whatever they want in international waters and they have their own agency to provide and govern this mining in international waters as you just mentioned it was NOAA.
Right now we are in a conundrum because we are eroding the floor of the international civil authority and the international law in general with this unilateral decision of the United States. So why would a Canadian company ask NOAA's permission to drill in international waters then? Because the Canadian, they saw the loophole, you know, if they do through the Americans, and you have a president right now. who seems to be going with their own will.
The American, they sign the Convention of the Law of the Sea, but they not ratify. What is the difference between these two things? If you sign and you don't ratify, that means that the executive power can take any decision on whatever it's signed. But if they ratify the Convention of the Law of the Sea, it's a different day, it's a different signature, you need to ask your Congress
for any activity that you want to do in that particular area that is governed by this international organization. So unfortunately for the whole international community, we have nothing we can do. Is there great pushback amongst your scientific colleagues? Of course, most of the scientists that we know.
And they said, you know, this is nonsense. We cannot go do deep sea mining. We don't even know the bathymetry of the place, how the seafloor looks like. Yeah. I want to talk about climate change for a minute. Because as you've hinted, one of the reasons behind deep sea mining is we need materials for solar panels and wind turbines and EVs to take some pressure off the planet's surface.
That's what they're saying we need to do. That's why we need to mine these nodules. What's your response to that? It's very simple. There is no need. The reason is because when you look at the grade of the elements that are so-called strategic and critical, The only one on the manganese nodule, which is more or less equivalent in quantity for the old Clarion-Clipperton song compared to Lung, is nickel.
All the other ones are below wherever we have on land. We need to scrap a huge amount of the ocean, not only the Clarion-Clipperton zone, to reach those levels. Copper, iron and manganese, they are very high in gray compared to land. They are not rare earth. The rare earth mineral, we need them more because we need the magnets to build the magnets. Without magnets, there is no turbine, there is no anything. No electric car.
But one thing that we never pay attention is when you do mine, one thing is to take the mineral from the rock because you need the element. This little pass from the rock to the element is called metallurgic. And the metallurgic, it produces huge amount of CO2. So what are we solving? Nothing. To get one kilo of pure copper, which is simple, many countries are producing copper worldwide, you generate between 8 and 12 kilos of CO2. This is gas. Just imagine the volume.
And for one kilo of one of these rare earth metals, we are talking about 15 to 20 kilograms of CO2. One of the questions is, why is China... kind of looking like they controlled rare earth minerals because nobody in the world wanted to do the metallurgy but it was so contaminated processes.
So everybody sends the material to China and you, China, you kill your people and just give us the rare earth mineral. Right now, the Chinese, they can do their own technology, right? So they don't need to sell you the rare earth mineral back. That's when the Americans and the rest of the world realized, wow, we need to do the dirty job in our backyard now. You see? So the narrative is more complex. Yeah.
Yeah, that's why it's called rare earth, right? Not that the element's rare. It's rare, it's tough to get it out of the ore, right? Exactly! There are tiny little elements in a huge formula of one mineral. Let's talk about the current state of deep sea mining. How many contracts has the International Seabed Authority granted, and what countries are really pushing for it? Well, there are 19 countries.
And there are 31 contract licenses for exploration, and they are everywhere. North, South Atlantic, North Pacific, Indian Ocean. and the one who is really pushing behind are entrepreneurs. Is this for exploitation or exploration? All of them are exploration. Right, but the metals company that we talked about is for exploitation. They want to go down. Exactly. With all of this said, while we're talking about this,
Why would a country or a company wait for the ISA to greenlight a mining permit if the U.S. could be willing to do it for you? Because nobody thought that anyone would go through America. Assim pelas da... So they all went through the
The common sense and consensus to do any process of exploitation of the deep sea in international water should follow international law. But with the precedent you have, he can step on the international ohana he's doing it you know since day one so there's no no miracle in that but Here, we have a real loophole because NOAA can really issue licenses for mining in international water. Let's say, what about if there are 169 countries that say, no, no, we are not going to do?
Well, we're going to be in a confrontation because the American will go to do the work in the Clarence Lipperton song. What the other country has to do? Send warships to the place. 7コイント Do you think other countries are going to follow suit and take advantage of this loophole? They're all looking around. They're all looking at what's going to happen now in July-August, which is the annual meeting of the International Space Authority. I hope that I will be there.
Because this is going to be historical. It will be laid out the future of international law. As simple as that. Right. So it seems like issues with deep sea mining have really... stalled for years as countries wait for the rules to set, but you're saying the Trump administration bypassing those rules, right? Yeah, doesn't need any rules. And your greatest concern is that everyone else will take advantage. Exactly. You're listening to the people who follow you.
They should think not only in today's and how we are going to do the next 10 days or 10 years, but just think in the future generation what world are we going to leave to our kids. The last boundary, there are nine boundaries who make our planet the planet we have and to keep the life that we know. And we are screwing up already with six of them. The number seven is called ocean acidification.
And with this thing, it will be exacerbated. Remember that I mentioned before, we will release CO2 sequestered for thousands of years back to the water again. Carbolic acid, you're gonna set it fine. That's right. Can you imagine two or three generations ahead? Senator, when money is involved.
Who cares? You care, and I care. I think there are many people who care, and we should care. We should care, and that's why we're talking about it, and that's why I'm so happy you've come on to talk about it, Dr. Mulsol. So, thank you for your work you're doing, for taking a time to talk with us. Thank you very much, Ira. Dr. Sander Mulso is a marine geologist at the Austral University of Chile.
And heads up, that Monday, we've got something special on the feed. A brand new audio documentary series Flora has worked on with the Hypothesis Fund called The Leap. In the first episode, Flora talks to Nobel Prize winner Katya Karako about going all-in on mRNA when the field was convinced It was a dead end. I have to say that when I mention to somebody that I make mRNA and I work with it,
Usually felt sorry if they were sympathetic or if they're less sympathetic, they thought that I'm crazy. That's Monday on the podcast. That's about all the time we have for now. A lot of people helped make this show happen. Shoshana Buxbaum Beth Ramsey Danielle Johnson Jackie Hirschfeld I'm Ira Flato. Thanks for listening.