It's never felt more true that wherever there is an unresolved question, a
desperate need or a global phenomenon, science is there, and the news headlines
from 2018 are no exception. We watched the dazzling eruption of the Kilauea
volcano in Hawaii and we received concerning climate reports from
government bodies. We grappled with disturbing data breaches and a volatile
Bitcoin market and saw the unfortunate health effects of gun
violence and addiction in this country. And we mourned the passing of legendary
physicist Stephen Hawking and many other prominent scientists. The editors of
Scientific American combed through all the top headlines from this year and
have put them together in one collection, this special edition which is on
newsstands now. I sat down with my colleagues so we could dive into these
stories on topics from human health to space exploration, earth science and
technology. Managing editor Curtis Brainard sits down with me to talk about
melting glaciers in the Arctic. Why was it so important for us to include this
story, "Meltdown" by Jennifer Francis? We see retreats in Arctic sea ice in the
summer time, we see retreats in wintertime sea ice, we see air that's
getting wetter and warme,r we see the amplification of certain geophysical
feedback loops that exacerbate climate change and warming, we see disruptions to
ecosystems. I think really what's changed this year, at least in the last couple
years, is the sort of growing realization that everywhere we look, this all
adds up. Records are being broken left and right. I mean, it's cumulatively,
the Arctic appears to be kind of spinning out of control.
Unfortunately I think a lot of people have a mistaken impression that the
Arctic doesn't matter, that it's it's a faraway location that has little to do
with certain backyard issues, as we call them, in the places we live. But in
fact, there are a lot of reasons to worry about what's happening in the Arctic and
the trends there. Most importantly, perhaps, sea level rise. I think that this
is a foremost concern of researchers and policy makers who are really aware of
this issue. If we see the same kind of melt continue that we've already seen in
the Greenland ice cap, and for that matter, you know, the
Antarctic ice cap, you know, we could see inundation of coastal cities worldwide,
across the Americas, Asia Pacific and so on.
Next senior editor Jen Schwartz and I
sit down to chat about disturbing new video technology.
So "Clicks, Lies and
Videotape" by Brooke Borel. You were the editor for this piece, tell us a little
bit about why it's so important and why it was worth us covering this year. We've
all really heard about disinformation campaigns, information that's put out
there to intentionally mislead us, so we wanted to take a deep dive into the
technology that drives it and makes it possible but also some of the social
factors that allow it to spread and allow us to be pretty susceptible to
fake video. And some research shows that even if you see false information once
it sets you up to be more likely to believe it the next time you see it and
so it's particularly scary nowadays when we have sort of influences
from outside our system with elections and that sort of thing. What is the
science behind that? When you read something, you know, is it a little more
distant than when you're seeing it in video, where it might feel like, you
know, a realistic scene, for example, feels a little more present or more
threatening perhaps to you, and so when you're seeing these things over and over
again it seems that it primes the brain to be more susceptible to believing
something if you see it again. So even if it's fake or it's it's not the truth, if
it reflects, perhaps, your values or if it scares you, if it feels like a risk, those
are the kind of things that tend to really go viral and spread. And so it has
a more profound effect on how we interpret that information.
Chief features editor Seth Fletcher joins me to talk about a disturbing
trend in human health This article, "American Epidemic" by
Melinda Wenner Moyer, is one of our longest, meatiest pieces in the magazine
from this year. Why is it such an important topic and deserve so much space?
So every year we do this series of articles, collection of articles, called
the future of medicine. And most years it is kind of this, it's cutting-edge stuff—
future of cancer treatments, individualized medicine, personalized
medicine, genomics. And when we were thinking about how to do it
this year, we noticed some trends that were kind of retrograde, retrograde,
shouldn't be happening in America really, and that is the emergence or
re-emergence of diseases that we thought we had under control or should
definitely have under control in the richest country in the world, like
hepatitis A and Legionnaire's disease. And so there have been outbreaks in cities
like Detroit, there was a Legionnaire's disease outbreak in the Bronx. The causes
are all social and economic, and so this is a really concrete example of what
happens when economic inequality just gets extreme and keeps growing. So these
diseases have been reemerging in very poor populations, where people are under
a lot of stress. They might not, you know, they might be in a food desert, they
might be homeless, there might be a lot of substance abuse. And it's just this
perfect situation, a breeding ground for these diseases that spread among the among
that population and hit those people particularly hard and and then spread
beyond that population. There were really exciting developments on Mars
this year, so space and physics editor Lee Billings is here to explain it all.
Lee, thanks for being here. So very exciting news from Mars this summer.
You're our space editor, why don't you tell us about it.
So guys, maybe you haven't heard, but we found a lake on Mars. Not just a frozen
dead, desiccated lake. A real live lake of liquid water. A lake on Mars! That's
really, really cool because we haven't ever found water there before, or we
found just little wisps of it on the sides of craters, or you know coagulating,
condensing on a lander leg, things like that. We've never actually found a
stable, sizeable source of water and this thing is probably about the size of
Manhattan. As to how deep it is, we don't really know in terms of depth. How did they
detect it? Well, they detected it through radar
sounding. So they're essentially sending radar beams into the surface and
it bounces back off of highly reflective materials like water or like ice. The
reason why we think this isn't ice is because it's in kind of this bowl-like
topological depression, which is exactly what you'd expect for water
underneath the surface and if you look at it, a lot of theoretical
calculations suggest that the overlying pressure of the the crust combined with
a little trickle of geothermal heat from underneath could combine to make this a
liquid water layer within the planet. And we could find out actually a little more
about that soon from NASA's InSight Lander, which recently landed on the
Red Planet and is going to be measuring that heat flux coming from within the
planet. So once we get that number down we could have an even better idea of
whether or not there's really liquid water there. Stephen Hawking once said
that scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest
for knowledge. Here's to a Happy New Year and a 2019 full of exciting science.
For Scientific American, I'm Andrea Gawrylewski.