Alaska Issues Its First-Ever Heat Advisory

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. Today– actually, tonight– is the summer solstice, the astronomical start of the summer season. But parts of the country have already been feeling the heat, including the first-ever heat advisory alert for Alaska– yes, Alaska. Here with more on that and other stories from the week in science is Umair Irfan. He’s a senior correspondent at Vox in Washington, DC. Welcome back.

UMAIR IRFAN: Hey, Ira. Thanks for having me.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s talk about this. Is this crazy, a heat advisory for Alaska?

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, in the summer, Alaska can get pretty warm. In the Far North, the days get much longer. And you can have up to 22 hours of sunlight. But now they’re seeing temperatures in the mid 80s and higher. And that’s not a temperature range that most people in Alaska are equipped with or familiar with. And that’s why they had to issue an alert to give people a heads-up that these are getting to temperatures that they may not even recognize on how to deal with.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, because the poles are warming faster than the rest of the world, right?

UMAIR IRFAN: Exactly. And so Alaska, of course, being close to the Arctic Circle, is seeing a phenomenon called Arctic amplification. And that means that Alaska’s average temperature is warming about two to three times as fast as the lower 48 or the global average. And some of the most acute effects of climate change and of warming are manifesting in Alaska. And it’s a vision into the future for much of the rest of the world.

IRA FLATOW: So 85 degrees counts as a real heat wave in Alaska?

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, right because heat waves are defined based on your local average. And so obviously, 85 degrees in a place like Phoenix, Arizona, may not make anybody sweat too much. But when you’re dealing with an area that has typical summer temperatures in the 70s, that’s a significant deviation.

And remember, Alaska doesn’t have a whole lot of air conditioning in their homes. A lot of the buildings are designed to retain heat rather than cool off. And so the effects on balance can actually be even larger in these areas.

IRA FLATOW: Well, I’m not going to get into the permafrost issue. Let’s move on because you have a related climate story about farming and food production around the world. Tell us about that.

UMAIR IRFAN: Right. So on one hand, humanity is producing more food than ever because we have all these technologies that are helping us, like fertilizer and crops that are much more resilient. But some research this week showed that even with these adaptation techniques, the effects of climate change are going to outpace what we can adapt to. And when we look at six key staple crops– these are soy, maize, sorghum, cassava, rice, and wheat– by the end of the century, under moderate warming, we’re expecting to see about an 11.2% decline across the board under moderate levels of warming.

IRA FLATOW: And that’s around the world, or just in the US?

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, that’s around the world. But it is important to zoom in to individual countries because one of the things that the study revealed is that the losses are not going to be spread evenly. And in fact, they’re going to be concentrated in places that are already growing a lot of crops– so the breadbaskets of the world. And that does include places like the Midwest of the US, where we do a lot of growing of wheat, corn, and soy.

And that runs counter to some of the conventional wisdom that expected a lot of the climate change effects in poorer countries and in more marginal countries. But it does show that this could actually have much bigger economic consequences because it’s the breadbaskets that are feeding the commodity crops into the global market. And if you see a big decline there, then that means food insecurity for everyone.

IRA FLATOW: Your common sense would tell you that if the climate is shifting, some places should be better for growing crops. Is that true at all?

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah, and that’s also revealed in the paper– that if you actually look at places like Canada and Russia, their crop-growing regions will expand. And if you actually look at rice, rice actually turns out to be a very adaptable crop. And on balance, we do expect to see its yields go up while the other five staples– their yields will, perhaps, decline.

IRA FLATOW: Well, I know that common sense doesn’t work in science. So I don’t depend on it a lot. We’ve been following the story of the bankruptcy of 23andMe. That’s that genetic testing company. And there’s news this week about what happens to all of its data. Umair, what happens to all of its data?

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, we’re finding out that there may be a new home for it, basically, back where it started. So Anne Wojcicki, the former CEO of 23andMe, after the company declared bankruptcy started a nonprofit called the TTAM Research Institute. TTAM stands for “23andMe” and– this week, placed a bid of $305 million to buy up the remnants of that company, outbidding Regeneron, which was the previous winner of the auction.

And Regeneron is this biotechnology company. You may remember they made the monoclonal antibodies that President Trump used when he had COVID-19. And so this is a way for Anne Wojcicki and her team to wrestle that data back and be able to use that.

IRA FLATOW: Now, I know among a lot of people, myself included, this is a big privacy concern. What did the companies and groups want this data for? And what will they do with it?

UMAIR IRFAN: On one hand, you have the genomes of 15 million people. And you can use that for a lot of interesting genetic screening, developing drugs, and just a whole lot of population-level research. But of course, this is genetic information, some of the most intimate information, from people. And there’s a lot of issues about how you’re going to monetize that or, essentially, how you could potentially use it to– against people, like in setting insurance rates. And of course, there’s also the actual issues of keeping this data private.

The company this week was fined 2.3 million pounds in the United Kingdom for a big data breach that they had in 2023. And that’s part of why this company’s bankruptcy auction– actually, the price was much lower because this company was once valued at $6 billion. And a lot of the companies that are looking to buy it up are just looking at it and thinking, the juice is not worth the squeeze here, that all this baggage that you have to deal with is– they realize that it’s going to be pretty expensive and costly and time-consuming to try to actually put all this genetic data to work.

IRA FLATOW: So we’ll keep watching what goes on there.

UMAIR IRFAN: Yes, definitely.

IRA FLATOW: Something completely different, as the Pythons used to say, seeing around corners– there’s a way to see around a corner without using a periscope now?

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, apparently, yes. Researchers in China have developed this technique that, essentially, if you look at the wall across from you when you’re standing around a corner, you can actually interpret the light bouncing off of that wall and unscramble it using an algorithm and reconstruct an image. So that’s one really fascinating thing.

The other aspect of this is that it doesn’t require any special equipment. They say that you can actually just do this with a camera phone if you have their software. So essentially, what it does is it looks at all the residue of light bouncing around a corner. And then it just deconstructs those points and then can reassemble the image.

The limitation here is that the image has to come from something that itself is emitting light– so a screen or a bulb– not something that is just passively reflecting light. But it could potentially unlock the key to do more sophisticated imaging. And it shows that we’re giving away a lot of information that– in ways that we may not realize. And we can interpret a lot more environmental information in ways that could be useful.

IRA FLATOW: Now, on the phones we have now, this could have that?

UMAIR IRFAN: Yes. Yeah. The phone that you have in your pocket could potentially do this.

IRA FLATOW: I’m keeping it in my pocket now, Irfan, just for that reason. In other imaging news, there’s a big unveiling next week, right? Tell us about that.

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah, the Vera Rubin Observatory– that’s in Chile– is going to release some of its first images on June 23 at 11:00 AM Eastern. If you go to their website, you can see if there’s someone hosting a watch party near you. There are going to be observation events all over the world. It’s going to be live-streamed.

And they’re hyping this up because this is a telescope that’s equipped with the largest digital camera ever built. And it was designed to take detailed images of the Southern Hemisphere over a long period of time. This is part of a 10-year project to build a time lapse of the southern sky. It will take photos every few nights and, basically, build this ultra-high-definition, ultra-wide record of the night sky.

The goal here is, one, just to have– of this image, but also to look for things that we can’t typically see with telescopes– so looking for dark energy and signs of dark matter. And that will help fill in some of the key blanks that we have in our understanding of the universe.

IRA FLATOW: Interesting. We talk about the Webb. We talk about the Hubble. These are in space. But this is a ground-based telescope, right?

UMAIR IRFAN: Right. And it’s located in Chile because this is an area that has a very favorable climate. And so it’s not just that the air is clear and dry. But also, there’s very low humidity. And so they have very low cloud cover. And they can have more exposure to the sky for longer periods of time, which makes it an ideal place for more telescopes.

IRA FLATOW: I like the idea that we can tune in and watch ourselves.

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah, that’s right. And you may have also seen that there was another telescope in Chile that announced that they also put out a new photo of this new galaxy called Sculptor. It’s about 65,000 light-years away. And critically, it’s in color. And so it spans the whole galaxy. And by looking at the colors, we can actually interpret what it’s actually made of.

IRA FLATOW: I’m going to try to tune in if I can watch this because this could be cool. This is right in my wheelhouse.

UMAIR IRFAN: Definitely.

IRA FLATOW: And there’s a– let’s move on to something else because there’s this new work in developing an early warning test for cancer. This is something everybody’s going to want to hear.

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah, that’s right. So essentially, the conventional ways of detecting and diagnosing cancer requires doing things like biopsies, essentially waiting for the tumor to actually emerge in some meaningful way and actually cutting into it. But increasingly, scientists are looking for ways to detect cancer in the bloodstream, looking for genetic markers.

And recently, there’s been a lot of interest in what they called multi-cancer early detection tests that do this sampling of blood and look for things like small snippets of DNA that indicate that cells have mutated. And then just this week, researchers have found that some of these warning signs of a potentially developing cancer can emerge as early as three years before a tumor actually reaches the diagnostic criteria.

IRA FLATOW: Wow, that is cool– and not ready for prime time yet, though, right?

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah. There’s a lot of details to iron out with this technique. But there also raises a lot of interesting ethical questions because when you’re looking at a cancer that early on, the question is, what can you actually do with that information?

So for some cancers– specifically, some of those that are incurable– maybe people just don’t want that information. And maybe with other cancers, people might start really aggressive treatment early on that could end up being counterproductive, that could lead to loss of quality of life for a cancer that would have otherwise been treatable at a later date. And so there’s a lot of uncertainty about how we actually use this information and what we can do with it in a way that will actually improve people’s lives. And that’s also really up in the air at the moment.

IRA FLATOW: All right. I have time for one quick last one. Last weekend was Father’s Day. But you’ve got a story about a very mature father?

UMAIR IRFAN: Yes, this father was 135 years old at the birth of their first child. This is Goliath, a Galapagos tortoise in Miami. And his bride, Sweet Pea, is somewhere between 85 and 100 years old. And they just had a baby on June 4. And so these data points make it likely that Goliath may be the oldest first-time father in history that we have ever observed, which makes sense because this species of tortoise can live up to 200 years. But now we’ve documented it.

IRA FLATOW: Well, congratulations to both of them. And help them very well. Thank you, Umair, for joining us.

UMAIR IRFAN: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

IRA FLATOW: Umair Irfan, senior correspondent at Vox in Washington.

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