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<title>Will We Find Planet Nine with the Vera Rubin Observatory’s New Telescope?</title>
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<img alt="A small blue sphere orbits a larger green sphere against a purple background, with &quot;Science Quickly&quot; written underneath." src="https://static.scientificamerican.com/dam/m/15dfc46f0f10e613/original/SQ-Friday-EP-Art.png?m=1715878940.917" referrerpolicy="no-referrer">
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<p>Pluto was unseated as the ninth planet in our solar system. Will we find a real Planet Nine?</p>
<p>
[CLIP: Theme music]
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<p>
<b>Rachel Feltman:</b> For <i>Scientific American</i>’s <i>Science Quickly</i>, I’m Rachel Feltman. Unless you’re really on the low end of our listener age bell curve, chances are you grew up learning about our solar system’s nine planets. Of course, unless you’ve been living under a rock since 2006, you also know that now we only have eight planets. Sorry, Pluto fans.
</p>
<p>
But maybe you’ve also heard rumblings about the mysterious Planet Nine. This hypothetical extra planet has been popping in and out of the news for more than a decade. Thanks to a new observatory set to come online in 2025, the truth about Planet Nine could finally be within reach.
</p>
<p>
Here to tell us more is Clara Moskowitz, senior editor for space and physics at <i>Scientific American</i>.
</p>
<p>
Thanks so much for coming on to chat today.
</p>
<p>
<b>Clara Moskowitz:</b> Thank you for having me.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> So, starting with basics, I feel like a lot of people have heard vaguely of Planet Nine. It’s a very evocative concept, but when we talk about Planet Nine, what are we actually talking about?
</p>
<p>
<b>Moskowitz:</b> So we’re talking about this potential planet—nobody knows if it actually exists or not—that might live in our own solar system.
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<p>
So if you think about it, it’s a wild idea that there could be this whole other planet in our solar system that we’ve never seen. You know, we obviously have these eight planets that we’re really familiar with. Then, of course, there’s the contested situation with Pluto. So it’s like, how could we have missed a whole other world in our cosmic neighborhood? And we’re not talking about something teeny tiny, either. This Planet Nine that might be out there is between, like, five and 10 times the size of Earth. So, you know, it would be a major member of the solar system if it’s there.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> Yeah, well, I have a lot of questions about that. But I think this is also a great moment to pause and—maybe for folks whose immediate reaction to Planet Nine is something like “We already have a ninth planet. It’s Pluto. How dare they?”—would you remind us what it is that got Pluto so contentiously demoted and why this theoretical Planet Nine would still have planetary status if it does exist?
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<p>
<b>Moskowitz:</b> Right. So actually, the two stories are related because the whole story of Pluto is what kind of led us to come up with this idea that there might be a Planet Nine. But let me rewind and explain how that’s the case.
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[CLIP: <a href="https://www.epidemicsound.com/track/cB3P4m6U3b/">“Handwriting,” by Frank Jonsson</a>]
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<p>
<b>Moskowitz:</b> The situation with Pluto began to become dicey in 2005 when astronomers discovered this big rock out in the solar system called Eris. Now Eris, turns out, is actually larger than Pluto, but it’s really far out there, which is why we hadn’t seen it before. It’s about 68 times as far from the sun as Earth. So when we found Eris, all of a sudden, astronomers started thinking, “If this thing is bigger than Pluto, then it’s got to be a planet, too, right?” You know, “What exactly is our definition of a planet?” And they realized we didn’t quite have one, a formalized one.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> [Laughs] It was more of a vibe, more of a state of mind.
</p>
<p>
<b>Moskowitz:</b> Exactly, exactly. So then astronomers got talking, and it’s really this group called the International Astronomical Union that makes the rules, and they decided that we needed new rules for what qualifies as a planet. So in 2006—this is right after the discovery of Eris—they were forced to come up with rules for what counts as a planet.
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<p>
So there’s three things. The body has to orbit a star, right? That makes sense, clearly. It has to be sufficiently massive for gravity to make it basically sphere-shaped. You know, it has to be round. If it’s small enough that it’s all chunky and oblong and funky, like asteroids, that’s not a planet. And then the third condition was that it has to clear its own orbit, meaning that it has to have enough gravity that it’s kind of pushed any other rocks or asteroids out of its orbit.
</p>
<p>
And it was actually that third thing that got Pluto kicked out because Pluto shares its neighborhood with a bunch of other rocks that kind of circle the sun along with it. So it really just isn’t big enough. So Pluto became what we now call a dwarf planet, along with Eris and along with a whole bunch of other objects similar to Eris that started to be discovered around this time.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> Yeah. And I know a lot of people found that really emotional, but it does seem like we would have had to have this, like, really long, ever growing roster of planets if we hadn’t settled on that firm definition. So I do get why it had to happen.
</p>
<p>
<b>Moskowitz:</b> Exactly. And then this is where the story starts leading toward the idea of Planet Nine because then they found this object called Sedna.
</p>
<p>
[CLIP: <a href="https://www.epidemicsound.com/track/MPQIjqEgqm/">“The Farmhouse,” by Silver Maple</a>]
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<p>
<b>Moskowitz:</b> Sedna is another sort of, you know, similarly sized, really-far-out-there object. The closest it ever gets to the sun is 76 times the Earth-sun distance. And then they found other objects like this.
</p>
<p>
But the weird thing about these is that they’re on these crazy orbits. The orbits are so stretched out and so distant, and they later found out they also seem to be tilted at this weird angle compared to all of the other planets in the solar system. So they’re just odd, but there’s a bunch of them like this. And scientists can’t really explain how you get all these objects on these extreme, weird, long orbits unless there was something hidden out there guiding them—kind of shaping their paths with its own gravity. And that hidden something would have to be pretty large.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> So now that scientists have, you know, spent more than a decade thinking about the possibility of Planet Nine, what evidence do we have to support that something like this actually exists?
</p>
<p>
<b>Moskowitz:</b> So the evidence is all in these other objects, these extreme trans-Neptunian objects that we see, and the fact that their orbits are so odd. Like I said, they’re just super large, super long orbits of a wholly different magnitude than the planets in our solar system.
</p>
<p>
So that’s one thing, and then the other thing is the tilt of their orbits. So in our solar system, we have what’s called an ecliptic. It’s a plane, and all of the eight planets orbit in this plane, roughly flat. So you can picture them all kind of orbiting in the same flat line. Meanwhile these other weird rocks way out there are orbiting at this total tilt. And it’s like, that’s hard to explain with physics because we think the planets would have all formed kind of together from this circumstellar disk that would have been circling the sun after the sun was born.
</p>
<p>
So after a star is born, you still have a lot of debris left over that didn’t quite make it into the star itself. And all that junk starts orbiting the star—the baby star—in this doughnutlike disk, and then that material eventually becomes the planets of the star’s planetary system. So it makes sense that they would all be in a plane, and it doesn’t make sense that you’d have this significant population of other things circling way far outside and at a total angle to the plane. For that to happen, you kind of need some other large object influencing everything, which is where we come to this idea of Planet Nine.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> Okay, so scientists have found these things that maybe suggest a Planet Nine, but what other explanations could there be?
</p>
<p>
<b>Moskowitz:</b> Right, so, you know, we haven’t seen the planet, so we don’t really know it’s there. One simple possibility is that we still just don’t know that much about these extreme, faraway objects or this realm of the solar system because it’s very hard to see. And it’s possible that this handful of weird objects that we have found just happen to be weird and that there’s actually a ton more objects out there with a lot more normal orbits—and that we’re just looking at, sort of, the outliers and seeing this trend and grabbing for an explanation, but perhaps, you know, it’s a lot more mundane than we thought.
</p>
<p>
There’s other explanations, too, like maybe a rogue planet or a passing star kind of flew by the solar system at some point and dragged Sedna and these other objects into their weird orbits a long time ago. So maybe they were influenced by some passing object that’s no longer part of our solar system. Astronomers have even proposed that, you know, there could be a hidden black hole out there in the further reaches of the solar system, pulling these things into weird places. It’s kind of, you know, this total hidden realm where we have no idea really what’s out there.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> So what kind of work is going on to answer these questions and, you know, try to figure out what’s out there?
</p>
<p>
<b>Moskowitz:</b> The very exciting thing about this story is that it’s a big mystery that we’re pretty much guaranteed to solve one way or the other soon because we have this giant new telescope coming online this year called the Vera Rubin Observatory.
</p>
<p>
[CLIP: <a href="https://www.epidemicsound.com/track/IQoAXsdOsW/">“Without Further Ado,” by Jon Björk</a>]
</p>
<p>
<b>Moskowitz:</b> It’s got the largest camera in the world, and it’s in Chile, at the top of a mountain, and it’s turning on this year. It’s supposed to have its first light in July.
</p>
<p>
And this thing is going to change everything. The way the Rubin Observatory is going to work is that it’s going to scan the sky every couple of days and just completely map the entire southern sky over and over and over. And that’s a perfect way to find more objects out there—potentially to find Planet Nine itself, if it is there—but either way, to find a lot more of Sedna-, Eris-like objects. With current telescopes, they’re really hard to see. They’re super far away, and they’re super dim. But Rubin is much bigger than anything we’ve used before, and it’s going to create these maps that if you see something moving in them from night to night, you know, you’re going to be able to identify the orbits of these objects.
</p>
<p>
And this should kind of completely transform our catalog of outer solar system objects. We’re just going to have orders of magnitude more. And so we should be able to see, really soon, the few that we know about—are they really weird, or are they typical? If there’s a lot more objects also on these strange orbits but also aligned with the trend, that supports the case for a hidden planet out there. On the other hand, if we see a lot more objects, and they’ve all got totally random orbits, and there’s no trends suggesting that a single object has carved this path for them, then that, you know, starts to push against the idea and the support for Planet Nine.
</p>
<p>
And like I said, the most exciting thing would be if we saw the planet itself, although that is not guaranteed, even if it does exist, because it just might be in a spot where it’s harder to see. You know, we’re still talking about extreme distances. The thing about Planet Nine is that it could be as far away as 700 times the distance between the Earth and the sun. I mean, that is just wild—like, Neptune, the farthest official planet in our solar system, is only 30 times the distance of Earth. So you’re talking about something else that’s 700 times this distance, maybe, you know, and that might only be five or 10 times the size of Earth. So it would be super hard to see, even with Rubin—but we can hope. We might get lucky.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> Yeah, that would be so exciting. But short of that, which obviously would be incredible, what do you think it would take for this to become, like, pretty widely accepted as probable fact in the astronomical community? What kind of evidence are we looking for to really clinch this?
</p>
<p>
<b>Moskowitz:</b> I think that if we get enough observations of other objects out there that all seem to have similar-to-each-other orbits that are very dissimilar from the orbits of the things we see in the inner solar system, we can use these objects as gravitational probes to sort of prove the existence of a large planet, even if we can’t see the planet itself. If you have enough data points, enough objects, out there that we can put all their orbits into a computer simulation and show that the only way they could be moving like this is if there was a planet in this location with this mass, a lot of people would be pretty convinced, whether or not we ever lay eyes on Planet Nine itself.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> Yeah, though if they get enough evidence to say that there’s definitely, you know, a massive influence on the gravity and we don’t have eyes on the planet, I do shudder to think what people on the Internet are going to say is out there [laughs], but I guess that’s always the case [laughs].
</p>
<p>
<b>Moskowitz:</b> [Laughs] That is always the case. And, I mean, I personally do like the idea that you have this little black hole kind of, like, lingering out there, making all this mischief, you know? So, yeah, it will not be a case closed. And yeah, there’s probably going to be a lot of debate and a lot of people saying, “Oh, I’m convinced,” and a lot of other people saying, “Oh, I’m far from convinced.” You know, that’s just how these things go. But it’s just really fun to be at this point in time where something big is coming either way, you know, and we should have a lot more information soon.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> Yeah, and it sounds like the Rubin is going to be huge for astronomy in general. Also, great name. I wrote a lot of articles about how Vera Rubin should have gotten a Nobel Prize. What are some other, you know, questions that we’re going to explore with this telescope that you’re excited about?
</p>
<p>
<b>Moskowitz:</b> Oh, yeah, I mean, it’s going to be really amazing to have these maps, I mean, because we’re going to see a lot of new objects. I mean, it’s going to be really helpful for finding potentially dangerous asteroids, right, nearby or heading our way. So that’s a big, important deal. You know, to be able to study what’s moving out there, what’s flying around us, is still really hard. It’s still—you know, you’re looking for these needles in haystacks, and Rubin should make a huge difference.
</p>
<p>
And then, you know, some of the biggest questions about the cosmos, like dark matter and dark energy—Vera Rubin, who you mentioned, is this wonderful, amazing scientist who provided the best evidence that we have that there’s probably this missing matter that we can’t see out there in the universe called dark matter. And we’ve been looking for it for decades, but we still don’t know what it’s made of. More and more astronomers are convinced that it exists, but we don’t know what it is. So Vera Rubin telescope should help us get much better measurements by studying, again, the movement of all these objects in our solar system, but our—mostly in our galaxy and in the universe itself—is going to give us ways to trace gravity and trace the presence and the placement and distribution of dark matter, and that should help us shed more light on what it might possibly be.
</p>
<p>
There’s another element that we didn’t mention, which is a sort of fun and funny aspect of this story, which is that the guy who is probably the greatest proponent of Planet Nine, you know, the person who’s most convinced that there is a new planet in the solar system, is also responsible for killing Pluto as a planet in the solar system.
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<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> Yeah, the infamous Mike Brown [laughs].
</p>
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<b>Moskowitz:</b> The infamous Mike Brown of Caltech [the California Institute of Technology] is a big part of this story. He is the one that discovered Eris and therefore forced the International Astronomical Union to change its definition of a planet. And then he’s the one who started saying, “Look, all these objects are pointing toward there being another planet out there.” And, you know, around this time, I think he had a daughter who was, like, eight or 10, and she was like, you know, “Maybe you can actually make up for the big harm you did by killing Pluto if you find another planet.” And he’s sort of on a quest now to do that, so part of you has to root for him to succeed, just for that reason.
</p>
<p>
[CLIP: Theme music]
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> [Laughs] Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for coming on to talk about space with us. It’s always such a pleasure to have you.
</p>
<p>
<b>Moskowitz:</b> Yeah, absolutely my pleasure. Thanks a lot.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> That’s all for today’s episode. We’ll be back on Monday with our good old science news roundup. In the meantime, do us a favor and leave us a quick rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast. You can also send us any questions or comments at <a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a>.
</p>
<p>
<i>Science Quickly</i> is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was reported and co-hosted by Clara Moskowitz. Emily Makowski, Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to <i>Scientific American</i> for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
</p>
<p>
For <i>Science Quickly</i>, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great weekend!
</p>
</description>
<link>https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/will-we-find-planet-nine-with-the-vera-rubin-observatorys-new-telescope/</link>
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<pubDate>Fri, 10 Jan 2025 11:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
<author>Rachel Feltman, Clara Moskowitz, Fonda Mwangi, Madison Goldberg</author>
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<category>Astronomy</category>
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<category>Astrophysics</category>
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<item>
<title>How the Outdoors Affects Our Nervous System and Changes Our Microbiome</title>
<description><figure>
<img alt="A small blue sphere orbits a larger green sphere on a black background, with &quot;Science Quickly&quot; written underneath." src="https://static.scientificamerican.com/dam/m/225cfca2d98f2cb5/original/SQ-Wednesday-EP-Art.png?m=1716342177.955" referrerpolicy="no-referrer">
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<p>Nature can affect our nervous system and diversify our microbiome—and you don’t need to go on a hike to reap the benefits.</p>
<p>
<b>Rachel Feltman: </b>Happy new year, listeners!<b> </b>For <i>Scientific American</i>’s <i>Science Quickly,</i> this is Rachel Feltman.
</p>
<p>
Whether you’re an avid backpacker, an occasional park stroller or someone whose relationship with the great outdoors falls somewhere in the middle, you probably already know that spending time in nature is a great way to de-stress. But what if leaf peeping could do more than just help you unwind? Well, according to a recent book, the sights, sounds and smells of plant life can have serious impacts on our bodies.
</p>
<p>
My guest today is Kathy Willis, a professor of biodiversity at the University of Oxford, where she also serves as principal of St Edmund Hall. She’s the author of <i>Good Nature: Why Seeing, Smelling, Hearing, and Touching Plants is Good for Our Health.</i>
</p>
<p>
Thank you so much for joining us today.
</p>
<p>
<b>Kathy Willis: </b>It’s a pleasure, absolute pleasure.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> So you’re a professor of biodiversity, and a lot of your work focuses on the well-being of plants and their ecosystems. How did you become interested in how plant life impacts human health and wellness as well?
</p>
<p>
<b>Willis:</b> So that’s right: I’m very much someone who’s always worked at the sort of interface between looking at vegetation and climate change and—very academic. But then I was working on a big international project and they asked me to—part of my role was to pull together the information about the relationship between nature and human health.
</p>
<p>
And as I was trawling through the literature I kept coming across this study published in 1984 in this journal, the top scientific journal, showing that people who looked out of hospital window beds onto trees recovered from gallbladder operations much faster and took less pain relief than those who didn’t. And I thought, “This is really strange.” So people looking on brick walls—how does that work? They’re in a chamber. They’re in a sort of a, you know, a hospital room, so it’s not anything to do with the environment of the <i>room</i>; it was to do with them <i>looking</i> on to something. Was it influencing their health?
</p>
<p>
And so that started me on a very different pathway because I started to look at this paper and realizing that, very clearly, the action of looking at nature was triggering not just <i>mental</i> changes but physiological changes in the body that was improving these recovery rates and effects for human health. And that’s how I started the whole journey of really saying, “Well, what else is there out there? What are the senses, when you interact with nature, [that] have an impact on our health and well-being?”
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> That’s fascinating, and your new book, you know, examines how those senses connect us with nature. Can you tell us a little bit about what you found when you went exploring? What does the research say about how we connect to plants and the outdoors?
</p>
<p>
<b>Willis:</b> So it’s both outdoors <i>and</i> indoors, but I’ll start—I can certainly start with outdoors. I mean, so the way I looked at it and the way I started to pull the literature together was looking at the different senses: so our sight, our sound, our smell, our touch, and then there’s a hidden sense, but we’ll talk about that later.
</p>
<p>
But what I found, actually, is that—very much that each of these triggers these different actions in our body, and there are three sort of mechanisms that get triggered when we interact with nature: the three direct ones.
</p>
<p>
But the first one is: it affects our nervous system. So it triggers changes in things like our breathing rate, our heartbeat goes down, our blood pressure goes down, our heart rate variability: it changes to a parasympathetic variability, which is—induces much more physiological calming. But it also affects our hormone system. So you can think about—I mean, I think, for me, it’s more obvious about the heart rate and the breathing, but for example, your adrenaline goes down.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> Mm.
</p>
<p>
<b>Willis:</b> Salivary amylase, which is a hormone that you get in your saliva, which is elevated when you’re stressed, that reduces. And then the—all these psychological experiments show that your psychological state is better when your senses interact with certain aspects of nature.
</p>
<p>
And then there are two other aspects of nature. The first is that when we breathe in the scents, those scents that you get are molecules—they are volatile organic molecules—and they basically become, they become a gas when they come out into the air from the plant. Those molecules pass into our blood. And once across our lung membrane and once in our blood, they interact with certain biochemical pathways in the same way as if you’re taking a prescription drug.
</p>
<p>
And then finally, the other things—and our body takes on those aspects of nature, and it comes inside our body. And actually, we shouldn’t be surprised about that; we know pollution gets into our blood—pollution in the air gets into our blood. But so, so do the good aspects of nature. And finally, what I also found out from looking at this research is that when you’re in a more biodiverse environment, that environment has a much more biodiverse bacterial assembly—the good microbes that we all need—and your body adopts and takes on the signature of that environmental microbiome, which I find, again, fascinating. And as a result of that it triggers all sorts of metabolic processes that are good for us.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> Very cool. And I would love to hear more about that hidden sense you mentioned.
</p>
<p>
<b>Willis:</b> So with the hidden sense, I mean, you know, with—we’re constantly being bombarded—I don’t know [if it’s] the same for you [laughs], but I, every time I open the newspaper here, I see another thing about how we must eat 30 plants a week and we should eat pickled vegetables and everything else to increase your gut microbiome. And that is true. I think there’s a lot of real very, very important science in there.&nbsp;
</p>
<p>
But what I learnt from looking at this is, first of all, that up to 93 percent of our gut microbiome is not inherited; it’s to do with our environment and what we eat. Now, we think about what we eat, but we don’t think about our environment. But a lot of work started about 10 years ago where they started to show that people that live in a more biodiverse environment—where you’ve got greater diversity of plants, different heights of plants, etcetera, etcetera—and more organic environments, so not using whole loads of fertilizers, that those environments, if you measure the air in those environments, they’re full of all these bacteria that we’re busily [laughs] chomping our way on, you know, food to try and get into our gut. And once we’re in those environments or we’re touching that organic soil, we adopt the signature, so we adopt all those good microbes, and it gets into our guts.
</p>
<p>
Now why is that important? Because then there’s a very—some beautiful study’s been carried out on kindergarten-age—so, you know, children go to nursery school, or play school, in Finland where they, basically, they, for 28 days, they—one group played in a sandpit [where] they poured in soil from the, the local pine forest, and the other group had sterile sand. And they measured their skin microbiota, they measured their gut—so through their poop—but then they also measured their bloods. And what they found was that after 28 days those that had played in the soil had this hugely elevated microbiome in their gut.
</p>
<p>
But the really critical thing in there is they measured their inflammatory markers in their bloods, and their inflammatory markers were right down. And they found the same with adults, adults playing with soil or adults even sitting in a room with a green wall: after 28 days they’d adopted that microbiome. But also, it’s affecting their bloods in a really good way. In the same way as we’re being told our diet—we ought to, with our diet, you know, eat more plants because it will do this—you can do that with your environment as well.
</p>
<p>
And I find that really, really fascinating. So as well as eating 30 plants a week we should be interacting with the plants daily in order to build up good bacteria in our gut.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> That’s really striking research, and I think it’s a great segue to—you know, many of our listeners might not have easy access to soil to play in or lush green spaces. What does the research say about harnessing those positive powers of plants in the outdoors when we’re stuck indoors or in urban environments?
</p>
<p>
<b>Willis:</b> You can absolutely do it indoors. And I—it’s transformed the way I—my offices and where I work and even my home because what it’s shown [is] if you have plants in your office, you get all the benefits. For example, having a, a vase of roses on your desk.
</p>
<p>
But on top of that plants in the room will seed the air with the good microbiota. And so something as simple as a spider plant—it doesn’t have to be something exotic and large; it can be a—something that reproduces rapidly like the spider plants. They’ve shown that those actively seed the air with this good microbiome.
</p>
<p>
But then again, indoors, there’s some beautiful studies showing that when you smell certain plant scents it affects how you are. So lavender makes you more relaxed because it—once it’s in your blood it interacts with the biochemical pathways as if you’re taking an antianxiety drug. So if you want to be more relaxed or want to go to sleep, you can diffuse lavender in your bedroom. If you want to be more awake, you should have rosemary.
</p>
<p>
And if you want to <i>really</i> do something that’s good for you, what they’ve shown is that the Cupressaceae family, when you smell that, not only does it decrease your adrenaline hormone, but it also elevates the natural killer cells in your blood. And the natural killer cells are those cells that attack the cancers and viruses cells, so we all want elevated natural killer cells in our blood. And so in my study at home I have Japanese cypress oil in a diffuser. I just—few drops in there, and I, every couple of days, I just push it on for 20 minutes. It does me no harm, but it probably does a lot more good.
</p>
<p>
So there’s so much you can do indoors, but the number of times I go into offices or houses and there’s—the only plant you see there is plastic, if you’re lucky. And so it’s really thinking, “What can I bring into the—my house or my office or where I live in order to bring about these well-being benefits?”
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> Yeah, you mentioned your own personal experiences with changing your environment and habits; could you tell us more about those changes? You know, which did you find most impactful?
</p>
<p>
<b>Willis:</b> One of the things I’ve found most impactful is just changing my route to work. So up until now—up until, you know, I started writing this book I went the quickest route, and, you know, I’m on my bike, and I’m just going down the streets. And then I started looking, and there’s some beautiful studies that have been carried out, particularly, actually, in the U.S. and actually in Japan as well, where they had—and the Japanese experiment was beautiful—they had a group of participants: Japanese males all [around] the same age, didn’t smoke, hadn’t taken any alcohol or anything. And they walked for 15 minutes [on] the streets, and they did 15 minutes going through the local urban park. And they measured their physiological and psychological markers and there was a significant difference. So walking through the park they were much more physiologically and psychologically calmer than if they walked for 15 minutes, the same pace, on the streets.
</p>
<p>
And that really got me thinking about: “Actually, can you tweak your route so that you spend more time on the way to work and back by going via the park?” which is what I now do. And it does make a difference. You just feel calmer. Now, part of me thinks, “Oh, well, I’m feeling calm because I know it should make me calmer,” but even if you’re <i>stressed,</i> what they’ve shown is that when you look on to green vegetation, you recover faster from stress—if you look on to nature and particularly on to green vegetation—then if you don’t.
</p>
<p>
And as we know, huge percentage of global diseases now are not the communicatable ones; they’re ones that actually follow on from high levels of stress, so that, you know, we really, really need to think about this very, very seriously because all that high level of stress in the longer run is really bad for us and for our, our health.
</p>
<p>
But the other thing, and maybe this is important for your listeners: you don’t have to be pounding the pavements running to get the benefits. There’s a lovely study where they measured the salivary amylase of people over an eight-week period and they could choose the exercise they did in the park. And what they found was that, actually, those people that went and walked to the park and sat down [laughs] had a greater reduction in the salivary amylase—i.e., less stressed—than those doing all the other things. I think that’s always worth remembering: you don’t have to be running to get these benefits; you just have to be looking and enjoying.
</p>
<p>
And then the other thing that I do now—when I worked on the chapter on sound and the sounds of nature, it’s really clear that certain sounds, like tuneful birdsong or the wind rustling in the trees or trickling of a stream, those have a really significant health benefit; all sorts of things are reduced. But even pain: they found in hospitals that people are having sort of surgery where they’re still awake, like with an epidural, that they have <i>much,</i> much lower stress levels if they can hear the sounds of birds and trees. So when I walk now I don’t wear my headphones—unless I’m near traffic, and then I do.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> That’s great advice.
</p>
<p>
Now that you’ve finished this book and it’s out in the world, what do you see as some of the most important areas for future research in this field?
</p>
<p>
<b>Willis:</b> So I think one of the big areas where the evidence is with nature is very much [that] we know that there are all these benefits that are triggered, but we need to be—now give the medical profession the details that they need to be able to prescribe properly. And we’re not there yet.
</p>
<p>
So for example, if you think about a practitioner, a [general practitioner] or, you know, someone that you go to with ailments, and they’ll normally prescribe you a prescription drug because all those clinical trials have been done on that prescription drug to tell you what drug to take for the condition. So we sort of know that: we know anxiety, etcetera, etcetera, can be relieved by interacting with nature.
</p>
<p>
But the second thing is: How much do you take? We also then need to set, you know, what the dosage iso for how long do you need to interact with nature in order to get the benefit?
</p>
<p>
And finally, which is really important for governments, certainly in the U.K. for the National Health Service, is: What’s the cost-benefit? So how efficient is that drug—what’s [the] efficacy of being in nature compared to, let’s say, cognitive-behavioral therapy to deal with clinical levels of anxiety?
</p>
<p>
But there are some really interesting studies coming out. There was one in Copenhagen where they took people who’d been off work because of anxiety, and they split them into two groups. And the first group did cognitive-behavioral therapy with a trained psychiatrist over 10 weeks, and they did two sessions a week. The other group did three sessions a week in the university gardens, and they could be doing stuff with the gardeners or they could be doing activities or just sitting. And after 10 weeks they looked at the number of visits back to the, the medical doctor and what they found was: actually, both were very successful.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> Mm.
</p>
<p>
<b>Willis:</b> But one of those—being in the garden—was much, much cheaper to deliver than the other.
</p>
<p>
But the <i>really</i> interesting thing about this study was that a year later, they went back and resurveyed these people to see how many were still at work. Now I had assumed, cognitive-behavioral therapy, they would be the ones more at work because they’d been given the—trained with the techniques to cope. But it was the other way around: that you had a much higher percentage of people who’d spent the time in the garden than those doing the cognitive-behavioral therapy.
</p>
<p>
So from that you can then start to work out what the cost-benefits are, and it’s that sort of experiment we need to be doing, along with these much bigger clinical trials. But even in Oxford, what we’ve been doing is: Instead of giving you this drug, how about going for a walk for 20 minutes three times a week? But where do you tell them to go walking? And so—especially in the winter. It’s all well and good in the summer—the birds are singing; it’s all sort of green and lush—but what about in the winter? So we’ve been looking in the botanic gardens and the glasshouses here. It’s that sort of approach that we need to be moving.
</p>
<p>
And then the other thing I would say—and I sit in the second chamber of the government, the House of Lords, and the thing that we really need to be doing is making sure that nature doesn’t always come so far down the priority list, that the first thing when you’re building in a city is you get rid of the nature. Because the most important thing that comes through from all of this is that people need to be near nature. And we’ve all signed up to that internationally, but trying to persuade governments, when they’re looking at city plans, to ensure that nature is part of the infrastructure and not just an add-on is quite hard work.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman:</b> Mm. Well, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a really interesting chat, and I know I’m definitely feeling extremely motivated to go spend more time in my local park, so I really appreciate your time.
</p>
<p>
<b>Willis:</b> Oh, thank you very much. It’s been really nice to talk to you.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman: </b>That’s all for today’s episode. We’ll be back with another one on Friday. And if you’ve been missing our weekly science news roundup, your wait is almost over: we’ll be rolling back into our regular publishing schedule on Monday.
</p>
<p>
<i>Science Quickly</i> is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to <i>Scientific American</i> for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
</p>
<p>
For <i>Scientific American,</i> this is Rachel Feltman. See you next time!
</p>
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<title>Reviewing the Climate, Health and Tech Stories We Covered in 2024</title>
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<p>We’re closing out the year with a roundup of the science stories that stood out to our editors in 2024.</p>
<p>
<b>Rachel Feltman: </b>Happy Monday, listeners! For <i>Scientific American</i>’s <i>Science Quickly,</i> I’m Rachel Feltman.
</p>
<p>
We’ve had a busy and exciting year here at <i>Science Quickly</i>. After a few months of working behind the scenes, I officially started hosting the show back in May. I’ve had so much fun chatting with you all three times a week since then, and I can’t wait for all the conversations we’ll get to have in 2025.
</p>
<p>
Before we here at <i>SQ</i> take a short break for the holidays, I thought it would be fun to ask a few <i>Scientific American</i> editors about the biggest science stories of the year. Let’s get into it.
</p>
<p>
<b>Andrea Thompson:</b> I’m Andrea Thompson. I’m the Earth and environment news editor at <i>Scientific American</i>.
</p>
<p>
So the biggest weather and climate stories this year are a lot of what we’ve seen in recent years: hurricanes, floods, record heat.
</p>
<p>
Hurricanes were a big story, especially in the U.S. this year. We had several really devastating ones and really surprising ones, kicking off with Hurricane Beryl, which was the earliest Category 5 on record for the Atlantic Ocean, and it <i>really</i> rapidly intensified, and meteorologists were just sort of left with their mouths hanging open watching this storm develop.
</p>
<p>
We had two really devastating hurricanes.
</p>
<p>
[CLIP: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImrqhcMDL9A"><u>NBC 6 meteorologist John Morales</u></a> speaks about Hurricane Milton in October: “ Incredible hurricane. It has dropped [chokes up]—it has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours. I apologize. This is just horrific.”]
</p>
<p>
<b>Thompson: </b>Hurricane Milton and then particularly Hurricane Helene, which dropped <i>tons</i> of rain on western North Carolina and wreaked absolute devastation there.
</p>
<p>
But it wasn’t just the U.S. that was hit by these storms. The Philippines actually had five typhoons, which are the same type of storm as a hurricane; it’s just called a different name in the Pacific than it is in the Atlantic. So they had five typhoons and a tropical storm, all within a month, which is a lot of storms. And that wreaked a lot of devastation and killed a lot of people there.
</p>
<p>
Besides those sort of big storms we had a number of heat waves, which is just something that is incredibly connected to climate change and is one of the easiest weather events to see the imprint of climate change in and is something we just see more of every year. They last longer, they are hotter, and they happen more frequently than they have in the past. And one of the notable ones this year was in the Southwest U.S. ...
</p>
<p>
[CLIP: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ecv1lHYfgOk"><u>CBS Morning News</u></a> anchor Anne-Marie Green discusses the heat wave in June: “A dangerous heat wave is threatening more than 30 million people across the Southwest this morning.”]&nbsp;
</p>
<p>
<b>Thompson:</b> Which has sort of been a focal point for these year after year. But Phoenix in particular had 113 consecutive days with high temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit [nearly 38 degrees Celsius] or higher. The previous record was 76 days in 1993. So that is a substantial increase on that. And so that heat caused hundreds of deaths just in Phoenix alone. So when you consider that those heat waves were over a broader area, you know, you’re looking at much higher numbers.
</p>
<p>
Of course, that wasn’t the only place that saw heat. There were also really terrible spring heat waves across a large swath of Asia, from the Palestinian territories to India, Thailand and the Philippines.
</p>
<p>
There were also huge floods.
</p>
<p>
[CLIP: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AikWmvLZxlc"><u>PBS News Hour</u></a> co-anchor Amna Nawaz speaks about flooding in October: “In Spain, where crews are searching for bodies in abandoned cars and swamped buildings after devastating flash floods...”]
</p>
<p>
<b>Thompson: </b>Spain was one of the sort of hallmark events this year because it was, I think, very surprising to people there; they weren’t expecting it. That caused a huge amount of devastation and death. There are also really major floods in parts of Africa—Sudan, Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad—and all of these also have some fingerprints of climate change on them.
</p>
<p>
So probably the biggest climate story this year is that it’s going to be the hottest year on record, which we know before it’s even technically over. We really knew this, honestly, at the end of October, just based on how hot all of the months of the year so far had been. And it’s going to surpass the record just set last year, which itself was record hot by a record margin.
</p>
<p>
So 2024 is even hotter than 2023, and that is also one of the hallmarks of climate change: that we see record-hot years increasingly happen. In fact, all of the hottest 10 years on record have been in the 21st century, and it’s probably not going to be long before the 2024 record falls.
</p>
<p>
You know, if I could pick just a couple words or phrases to describe 2024, it would be “record-hot” and “extreme.” And I feel like those are probably [laughs] the words I would have picked in a lot of other years, too, but it’s just—that fact is a sign that climate change is here and it’s happening now. It’s not a future problem, as I think we thought about it as, you know, a couple decades ago; we’re living it right now, and every year really bears that out.
</p>
<p>
And, you know, looking ahead to 2025, we obviously can’t know if 2025 might be the year that breaks 2024’s record. I think right now climate scientists would probably say it’s not as likely, in part because we’re expecting a weak La Niña.
</p>
<p>
So most people have heard of El Niño. La Niña is the opposite; it’s sort of the flip side of an El Niño. An El Niño happens when water temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean are higher than normal, and that releases heat into the atmosphere that causes this cascade of changes in weather around the globe. So La Niña is the opposite; it’s when those temperatures are colder than normal. That also—it changes weather patterns. It also tends to slightly cool global temperatures, whereas El Niño slightly raises them. And part of why 2023 and 2024 were record-hot is a little bit due to El Niño, although [the] vast majority of that heat is from long-term climate change.
</p>
<p>
But with a weak La Niña likely developing in 2025, global temperatures might be a little bit lower, so it’s possible 2025 will come in under 2024 and 2023. But it’s still, even with a La Niña, going to be among the hottest years on record, almost certainly. The years where we see La Niñas now are actually <i>hotter</i> than some El Niño years from 30 or 40 years ago. And that is really a mark of how much climate change has impacted global temperatures.
</p>
<p>
You know, in terms of weather that we might see, sort of in broad seasonal trends, we are going to see heat waves somewhere. They are going to break records. There are going to be hurricanes and typhoons around the world. Where they’ll hit, how strong they’ll be, we can’t know. There are going to be floods in places. These things are going to keep happening every year, and climate change is having an impact on all of them: to increase their likelihood, to make them worse and to make them happen more often.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman: </b>Climate was obviously a major theme in the news this year, but we also had a lot of health stories to tackle—including a few that aren’t existentially distressing. Let’s look back on some awesome health advances from 2024.
</p>
<p>
<b>Tanya Lewis: </b>I’m Tanya Lewis, senior editor for health and medicine at <i>Scientific American</i>.
</p>
<p>
So we actually learned a lot of really cool things about the human body this year. One thing we learned, which you might remember from an earlier podcast episode, is that scientists discovered a new pain medication that works by blocking nerve channels before the pain reaches the brain, and it’s not addictive like opioids.
</p>
<p>
Another thing we learned is that vitamin D deficiency is not as big of a problem as we thought. Early in the 2000s studies suggested that vitamin D deficiency was a contributor to cancer, heart disease and many other illnesses and that taking vitamin D supplements might help. But more recent studies have failed to show as much of a benefit as we thought, and most people actually have adequate levels of vitamin D.
</p>
<p>
Researchers have also discovered ancient brains that are miraculously well-preserved for thousands of years after death. And they think that these brains might be undergoing a process of protein “misfolding,” which resembles what happens in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s or even mad cow disease.
</p>
<p>
Finally, there’s a new advancement that can help people who are born without a uterus. Scientists have found a way to actually transplant uteruses from a healthy donor into these individuals, who can then get pregnant and give birth to a live baby.
</p>
<p>
If I could describe 2024 in three words, I think I would choose “unexpected” because we are constantly seeing and learning new things about the body and about new diseases that we didn’t expect. I would say “political” because unfortunately, health, like all aspects of science, have become politicized. And then finally, not to leave on a downer, but I would say “ominous” because there are, unfortunately, some major public health threats looming, like the potential of a bird flu pandemic.
</p>
<p>
In 2025 I will be keeping a close eye on bird flu, or H5N1, the virus that’s been transmitting among wild birds and dairy cows and poultry in the U.S. I’ll be following what’s happening with the politicization of science under the new administration—a new presidential administration—and hope to see, you know, areas of consensus, hopefully, between the different parties so that we can keep Americans healthy.
</p>
<p>
While there are many public health threats that loom on the horizon, there’s still a lot to look forward to, and we’re just beginning to see some of the fruits of decades of research in things like mRNA vaccines and weight-loss drugs and many other developments. I think we’re in a pretty good position to tackle some of these major public health threats that we might be facing in the coming year.
</p>
<p>
<b>Feltman: </b>I don’t know about you, but I’m grateful for that spot of optimism. Also, let me take this opportunity to sneak in my favorite reminder one last time this year: now is not the time to start exploring the world of raw dairy, no matter what people on TikTok might tell you. Just hit pause on that one at the very least.
</p>
<p>
Speaking of the Internet: Here’s associate technology editor Ben Guarino to tell us how the artificial intelligence conversation evolved in 2024.
</p>
<p>
<b>Guarino:</b> The focus of 2024 in AI has definitely been on generative AI because the biggest developments this year were often in the new forms of what it could make. When ChatGPT was unveiled in 2022 we saw it make text, but now generative AI is making really convincing audio. I watched a demo of a ChatGPT-based voice where the user asked it to count to 30 really fast and then it paused to catch its breath in the middle of counting. So the folks who are developing these generative systems are really looking to: How do they sound human, and, and how do they feel authentic? So there’ve definitely been improvements to audio.
</p>
<p>
Generative AI has now been moving into things like video with OpenAI’s really impressive video maker, Sora, which it showcased as a demo earlier this year and then, at the start of December, released to its paying customers. I tried to log in right away to use it, but the traffic was so heavy, I, I couldn’t get in, so there’s definitely an interest in using generative AI to make video.
</p>
<p>
And with that also started to come some backlash. So I’m thinking of, in November, Coca-Cola turned some of its iconic ads into movie—into video using generative AI and people piled on online, so there’s definitely been, on the one hand, if we’re looking at the big trends in generative AI, an improvement in what it can do, but also, I would think, an awareness and maybe a more pronounced backlash this year than we’ve seen in previous years: understanding how generative AI was trained on data, on what artists made, on what writers have written. And also maybe some concerns about it taking work away from people.
</p>
<p>
Pew Research has done surveys each year, going back for the past few years, looking at how people are excited about AI or concerned about AI, and over the past three years an increasing proportion have said that they’re more concerned than excited about AI, and, and I think that might be a trend we will see continue into next year.
</p>
<p>
One major area that AI had an impact in 2024 is definitely search. So at the start of this year Google didn’t have AI answers in its search results, but to me that’s almost wild to think about; I’ve gotten so used to seeing them already, you know? If anybody is a regular user of Google Search, I have to imagine that you’ve seen the generative AI results at the top, and these are gonna stick around—Google’s latest numbers, I think, were that one billion people have used Google’s large language model, which is called Gemini, in Search, and talking to the <i>New York Times</i> recently, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that, you know, to expect Google Search to continue to evolve in 2025, and I have to imagine that’s gonna be more layering of artificial intelligence into search results.
</p>
<p>
And there’s also been an awareness, too, of the energy demands of generative AI. And there are some estimates, although the figures aren’t exact, that adding generative AI to search results is increasing, not insubstantially, the energy demands on every time that you search something on Google.
</p>
<p>
If I could describe 2024 in three words, I would say “boom.” We’re definitely in an AI boom. I think this really was the year that AI started showing up on our phones, started showing up on our computers, started showing up in our workplaces in more obvious ways than maybe we had been familiar with before. There have been huge investments in AI and continued investments in generative AI. We saw OpenAI make plans to move from a nonprofit to a profit. We saw Elon Musk break up with OpenAI and roll out his competitor, Grok, on X, formerly Twitter.
</p>
<p>
The next word I would pick, I think, as a consequence of that boom is “slop.” “Slop” was a contender for Oxford’s word of the year; it lost out to “brain rot.” But “slop” means this AI equivalent of spam. So if you were on Facebook at all earlier this year, maybe you encountered something like “Shrimp Jesus,” which was this phenomenon where people were using chatbots to make these bizarre chimeras of religious figures and crustaceans, or these clearly AI-made images of structures built out of Coca-Cola bottles, and it’s really—was just engagement bait.
</p>
<p>
I’ll take a slightly more optimistic note with the third word and I’ll say “promise.” I mean, we saw some clever and what I would consider good uses of AI in terms of pattern recognition, of using AI to help decipher a scroll that was burned by the Pompeii volcano from hundreds and hundreds of years ago, to AI helping in drug development for looking for novel forms of antibiotics. So there definitely is something here to AI. I don’t want to be too cynical here; I think it’s good to be critical, but this definitely is a technology that has promise.
</p>
<p>
In 2025 I think we’re going to see more about the hunger for water and energy and resources that generative AI needs, especially for the large data centers required to operate it. We know that Microsoft is looking at reviving, for instance, one of the mothballed reactors at Three Mile Island, the nuclear power plant, to power its data centers. There’s been more attention paid to what’s called “Data Center Alley” in the mid-Atlantic. In terms of keeping these data centers active, that requires fossil-fuel plants.
</p>
<p>
I also think we’re gonna start to see more forms of generative AI—so that’s AI based on LLM-type style models—that aren’t quite like the chatbots we’re familiar with. I’m thinking specifically, as an example, what are called AI agents. So these are systems that you would access on your phone or computer like you would a chatbot, but it’s got more autonomy to do things.
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| If you subscribe to [Science Quickly](https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/science-quickly/)，where the URL is \`https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/science-quickly/\`, extract the part \`https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/\` to the end, which is \`science-quickly\`, and use it as the parameter to fill in. Therefore, the route will be [\`/scientificamerican/podcasts/science-quickly\`](https://rsshub.app/scientificamerican/podcasts/science-quickly). | |
| If you subscribe to [Science Quickly](https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/science-quickly/)，where the URL is \`https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/science-quickly/\`, extract the part \`https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/\` to the end, which is \`science-quickly\`, and use it as the parameter to fill in. Therefore, the route will be [\`/scientificamerican/podcast/science-quickly\`](https://rsshub.app/scientificamerican/podcast/science-quickly). |
| view: ViewType.Articles, | ||
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| zh: { | ||
| path: ['/podcasts/:id?', '/podcast/:id?'], |
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| path: ['/podcasts/:id?', '/podcast/:id?'], | |
| path: '/podcast/:id?', |
| id: 'ID，见下表', | ||
| }, | ||
| description: `:::tip | ||
| 若订阅 [Science Quickly](https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/science-quickly/)，网址为 \`https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/science-quickly/\`，请截取 \`https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/\` 到末尾 \`/\` 的部分 \`science-quickly\` 作为 \`id\` 参数填入，此时目标路由为 [\`/scientificamerican/podcasts/science-quickly\`](https://rsshub.app/scientificamerican/podcasts/science-quickly)。 |
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Suggested change
| 若订阅 [Science Quickly](https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/science-quickly/)，网址为 \`https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/science-quickly/\`，请截取 \`https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/\` 到末尾 \`/\` 的部分 \`science-quickly\` 作为 \`id\` 参数填入，此时目标路由为 [\`/scientificamerican/podcasts/science-quickly\`](https://rsshub.app/scientificamerican/podcasts/science-quickly)。 | |
| 若订阅 [Science Quickly](https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/science-quickly/)，网址为 \`https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/science-quickly/\`，请截取 \`https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/\` 到末尾 \`/\` 的部分 \`science-quickly\` 作为 \`id\` 参数填入，此时目标路由为 [\`/scientificamerican/podcast/science-quickly\`](https://rsshub.app/scientificamerican/podcast/science-quickly)。 |
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Example for the Proposed Route(s) / 路由地址示例
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