Possible Signature Of Life Detected On Exoplanet—Maybe

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is Science Friday. I’m Flora Lichtman. Later in the hour, using science to improve road design and a conversation with a blind inventor about his mission to make the world more accessible. But first, major galactic news this week– scientists may have detected possible signs of life on a planet right here in our galaxy. Is this one of the best hints we’ve gotten that alien life exists? We’re going to talk about it.

Here to discuss this and other science news of the week is Anil Oza, science reporter at STAT and MIT, based in Boston, Massachusetts. Anil, welcome back.

ANIL OZA: Hello, hello. No better way to spend a Friday.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Agree. So this space news seems exciting. Why do scientists think they’ve found signs of life?

ANIL OZA: Yeah, some astronomers are pretty excited that they’ve detected traces of dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide on a planet that’s light years and light years away. And it’s really exciting because here on Earth, that chemical can only be created by living organisms, so this may be a hint that there is life on this planet.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How did they figure this out?

ANIL OZA: Yeah, so they used data from the James Webb Space Telescope, which was launched just a couple of years ago. And that can be really far into the galaxy. And using data from the light of different planets and stars, it can analyze that to know what chemicals are present there. And in the past, they’ve seen some carbon-based chemical signatures and other things that could imply life. But this one is really exciting because as far as we know, this can only be generated by living organisms.

FLORA LICHTMAN: The DMS and DMDS.

ANIL OZA: That’s right, yeah. But they didn’t want to jump to conclusions too fast, as they hint that there is life, but they’re not 100% saying that there is life on this planet.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, I mean, we hear stories like this all the time, and I was going to ask, where is this on the continuum of, yes, intriguing lead among other intriguing leads to, aliens exist.

ANIL OZA: Yeah, scientists are saying this is the strongest sign yet that we’ve seen life on other planets. But there’s also a little bit of the astronomer cried wolf situation going on where they thought they detected this chemical a couple of years ago, and when other scientists started reanalyzing their data, it didn’t really hold up.

So there’s the first question of, is this study correct? Are they correctly identifying that there’s dimethyl sulfide? But then also there’s a question of maybe there are other ways to generate this chemical that we just don’t know about here on Earth.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And I guess this planet 124 light-years away. So we’re not going to zip over and scoop up some of this ocean anytime soon.

ANIL OZA: No, we’re not getting any visits from them anytime soon.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [CHUCKLE] OK, in other news– and I you’ve reported on this– the Trump administration is continuing to cut and propose big cuts to science, and one target has been indirect costs. Can you walk us through what indirect costs are?

ANIL OZA: Yeah this may be the most important thing in research that you have probably never heard of. So when scientists apply for grants, say, from the federal government, they apply for a certain amount of money to do the work that they need to do. But on top of that, the government in this case will pay a percent to the institution that a researcher is at to cover what are known as indirect costs.

So these are things that are difficult to itemize on any one research grant. So space in a building– like a lab, electricity, plumbing, shared staff. And these rates vary widely from university to university. So if you have really complicated equipment like particle accelerators, fancy MRI machines, these can be really high.

And since Trump has come into office, he and his administration have proposed slashing these. So they would want a blanket rate at all of the universities, which, if implemented, could be existential for the way that we think about research here in the US.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What’s the blanket rate that they want?

ANIL OZA: They want to be 15% of a grant, which is much lower. The average right now at universities is 25% But at these research-heavy institutions, it can be anywhere from 50%, 60%, even sometimes 70% So this would be a massive, massive cut.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So, I mean, 15% can be standard for indirect costs budgeting in other industries. Why is it different in science? Why can it go as high as 70%?

ANIL OZA: Yeah, so the science that we’re doing now increasingly requires really fancy, complicated equipment. And so to do this work, you need really high indirect cost rates. And so this is where people are saying that if we do have a flat rate, we need other things to step in. We either need grants to supplement these indirect costs to buy this big equipment, to give block grants maybe to universities to pay for buildings– particularly if they’re in really expensive cities. Those could really add up.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Why is the administration targeting indirect costs? What’s the argument?

ANIL OZA: Their argument is that this money is not doing as much work as it should. So they have argued that they want to transition money from indirect costs to direct costs. So that would be moving this money from paying for things like buildings to actually funding researcher salaries, chemical reagents, things that are used in experiments.

But I think this is somewhat a misconception of what indirect costs are. They’re not just a tip that you’re adding on top of a grant. These costs are built into needing to do this research. You need a lab to do an experiment. You need electricity and plumbing. And so that’s the argument, but researchers would really push back on that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What are the potential impacts if this goes through?

ANIL OZA: Yeah, it’s tough to say. So this is right now locked up in the courts, and it’s being paused. It wasn’t deemed lawful. So we’ll have to see how that plays out. But if this does go through, I think we will see a completely different research infrastructure. Since World War II, universities have really relied on the federal government to supplement their research infrastructure. And if the government is no longer willing to do that, it could really reshape the way that we think about science in the US.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So Harvard has been in the headlines this week, too. What’s happening there that’s impacting research?

ANIL OZA: That’s right. So they made news because the Trump administration sent a list of demands to Harvard last Friday in response to this anti-Semitism task force that they have assembled in the federal government. And they were asking Harvard to make sweeping policy changes and notably, to allow for federal oversight on the university and the classes it teaches, the people they hire, and things like that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And what happened?

ANIL OZA: Yeah, so this is a similar demand that they gave to Columbia University. And Columbia submitted to the Trump administration, or they are going to do much of what they asked for. Harvard decided to say no, which initially I think garnered, a lot of praise from researchers and people onlooking.

But people at the university sort of took this with some pride but a lot of unease, because they assume and rightfully so, that it would lead to more grants being terminated and the Trump administration using the tools that it has to target Harvard.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Just to step back a little bit, I mean, you’ve been reporting on these cuts to science. How are the researchers that you’re talking to– how are they feeling?

ANIL OZA: I mean, they’re gutted. This is unprecedented, which feels like a word we’re saying all the time now. But in the past, having a grant terminated was such an abnormal thing. You would need to do really egregious research fraud. You would really need to be doing something wrong to have grants terminated. So researchers aren’t used to this.

Whereas researchers now all the time are getting grants terminated. But there isn’t a process to know what to do here, and so they’re just sort of floundering and not really knowing what to do.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, speaking of basic research and why we still might want to do it, let’s move on to this really cool brain science story this week. Scientists created the largest map yet of a brain? Tell us about it.

ANIL OZA: Yeah, so this is the most detailed brain map that we have. It’s just the size of a poppy seed from the brain of a mouse. It’s about 1 cubic millimeter. But inside that millimeter is 200,000 brain cells, 500 million connections between these cells, and almost 4 kilometers of neuronal wiring.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So this is a piece of a mouse brain.

ANIL OZA: Yeah, this is just, like, a tiny slice of it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How did they build it?

ANIL OZA: So they took a part of the mouse brain, and they basically dissected it into really tiny, tiny parts. And then they could reverse engineer by taking these pictures and putting them together in a 3D model.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Did this study include mice watching The Matrix, or am I making that up?

ANIL OZA: Oh, they absolutely did. So they took parts of the mouse’s visual cortex. And for that to matter, they need to be watching something. And so these researchers chose to let them watch The Matrix for whatever reason.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Preference, sounds like.

ANIL OZA: Right, yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, so what do you do with this map? How is it useful?

ANIL OZA: So there’s a lot of fundamental questions that we can answer about the brain and how these cells decide to wire up based on these maps. But obviously, the end goal is getting a map of the human brain. But the human brain is so large, so complicated that we need to inch our way up there.

So we’ve taken brain maps of really small insects. We’ve now mapped the brain of a fruit fly. And so the mouse is like that next step to the human brain, eventually.

FLORA LICHTMAN: While we’re on brains, there’s a story this week about a salmon brain on drugs. Specifically benzos. Give us the details.

ANIL OZA: Yeah, the salmon may be having a better time than we are. So researchers in the past have found that there are about 900 different drugs in the runoff of our streams and rivers, and some of those include antibiotics but also antidepressant medications. So this group of researchers set out to figure out what exactly that’s doing to them.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So how did they do the study, and what did they find?

ANIL OZA: Yeah, so they took a handful of fish, and they gave them clobazam and tramadol, which is an anxiety med and a pain med, and then sort of sent them off on their way to migrate from the river to the ocean. And they found that they were really successful in doing so.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What do you mean?

ANIL OZA: So when fish are migrating, they may encounter dams which have these really fast-going fans. And so the fish need to figure out how exactly to navigate that. And typically, fish will sort of just wait and assess what’s going on with this fan and how to do it safely.

But these fish on benzos would just go straight through it, not even thinking twice about it, which made them migrate a lot faster than the other fish that were not on drugs.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So less anxiety about clearing the dam.

ANIL OZA: Absolutely, but it may not be all good. When they get to the ocean, we don’t know how successful they are, so they may get eaten because they’re not anxious enough for predators and things like that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I can’t imagine this is a good news story, even if they’re successfully navigating the dams.

ANIL OZA: No, but we need to take what little good news we can have right now.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Tax season, mercifully, is over– that’s some good news– as of this week. But apparently the history of tax evasion goes back a long time.

ANIL OZA: Yeah, it goes back almost 1,900 years ago, according to a new study that The New York Times reported on, where someone 1,900 years ago falsified documents on papyrus so they wouldn’t have to pay as many taxes as they should have.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What happened to the tax evader?

ANIL OZA: So the records on that are not entirely clear. But based on what we know about law from back then, if he was caught, he was probably either beheaded or had his face eaten by leopards.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Oh, boy, eaten by leopards. OK, well, that seems like the perfect place to end it. Anil, thanks for joining me.

ANIL OZA: Of course. Thank you so much, Flora.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Anil Oza is a reporter for STAT and MIT, based in Boston, Massachusetts.

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