Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! And happy August. For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Let’s kick off the month with a quick roundup of some of the latest news in science.
First, we have Andrea Thompson, senior news editor for sustainability at Scientific American, to tell us about last week’s earthquake and the resulting tsunami waves.
Andrea Thompson: Last Tuesday a magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck off the coast of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula in a subduction zone, where the Pacific plate is plunging below part of the North American plate. And subduction zones are typically where you’d see tsunamis be generated because you have a big shift in the earth that sort of provides a big push to the water. And this area, actually, did produce a really big tsunami back in 1952, when there was a magnitude 9.0 earthquake.
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So sort of tsunami alerts, warnings, advisories were released kind of all around the Pacific—so there were some in Japan; some in Russia; Hawaii; all along sort of the North American coastline, you know, from the Aleutians down to Southern California; also in South America.
And some of this is because we generate warnings if there is the likelihood of tsunami waves arriving and there is the possibility of them causing damage, because you wanna give people as much time as possible to move away from the coast or reach higher ground. And then in the hours after an earthquake we sort of get more information that helps refine, “Okay, how much energy was released? How is that likely to track sort of around the basin?” And, and that’s why you’ll see changes, going from maybe a warning to an advisory or something different.
Luckily, the waves were not catastrophic, but there were eight-foot waves in parts of California. There were definitely waves in Japan and in Hawaii. Luckily, in a lot of these places they didn’t cause considerable damage, but, you know, there was structural damage, and these kind of waves, they’re not on the scale of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake or the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, but they’re still strong enough to sweep a person off their feet or to wipe away a structure.
So, you know, a magnitude 8.8 earthquake is a really big earthquake [laughs]. That is up there among the strongest ever on record. In 1952, when there was a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, that caused damage as far away as Hawaii. This one, it turns out, did not produce as big a tsunami as that, although 8.8 sounds really close to 9.0, but the scale of measuring earthquakes is not linear, so there’s a big jump in the amount of energy released when you go from 8.8 to 9.0, which is probably part of the reason this earthquake didn’t produce as big of a tsunami.
So I think one of the things that [we should] take away from this is that our warning systems work really well. You know, in 1952 a lot of people were killed and there was damage because no one knew what was happening. And we’ve built up these really robust tsunami warning arrays and sensors, and through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration we have monitoring for tsunamis and issuing warnings, and it’s clear that it works: people were alerted, they were able to stay away from coasts, and we didn’t see, you know, the casualties that we could have if there wasn’t a warning. And that is also because we’ve put a lot of public funding into the science behind this and to keeping this running.
Feltman: Thanks for that update, Andrea.
Next, some troubling news from the Environmental Protection Agency. Last Tuesday the EPA began making moves to repeal the so-called endangerment finding. This 2009 declaration concluded that several greenhouse gases pose a danger to public health and welfare, which meant they could be regulated as pollutants under the Clean Air Act. The endangerment finding followed the analysis of decades of research and the review of more than 380,000 public comments.
Last week the Department of Energy put out a report rebutting the endangerment finding. The agency said the report offers a “critical assessment of the conventional narrative on climate change.” Indeed, the report appears to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change across the board. The report argues that CO2-induced warming “appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed” and that U.S. policy actions to curb global climate change will have “undetectably small” impacts while potentially causing economic harm.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, who announced the agency’s proposal to rescind the endangerment finding at an auto dealership in Indiana, claimed the move could save an estimated $54 billion annually, but experts are pushing back.
Rachel Cleetus, a policy analyst and economist at the advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists, told the Washington Post that the EPA’s proposal contained “fringe arguments” that “go against the established science.” Scott Saleska, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, told the Associated Press that “to repeal the endangerment finding now would be like a driver who is speeding towards a cliff taking his foot off the brake and instead pressing the accelerator.”
The proposal won’t be finalized immediately. There will first be a public comment period, so we’ll keep you posted on the details of that.
Now let’s move on to some news you can use: a study published last Tuesday in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine suggests that picking up your walking pace for just 15 minutes a day could help you live longer.
The new research uses data from the Southern Community Cohort Study, which enrolled about 85,000 people between the ages of 40 and 79 from 2002 to 2009. Researchers included data from 79,856 of the study participants, the majority of whom were from low-income populations. Study subjects had reported the average amount of time they spent walking each day and offered estimates for how much of that time they spent walking slowly (walking around at work, walking a dog or lightly exercising, for example) versus walking fast (such as climbing stairs, exercising, or walking briskly).
The researchers then cross-referenced their study subject list with the National Death Index to track the participants’ mortality through the end of 2022. The team found that walking quickly for just 15 minutes each day was associated with an almost 20 percent decrease in mortality. Three hours of slow walking a day was associated with a 4 percent reduction.
Of course, any amount or type of movement is good for you, so don’t be discouraged if you’re not power walking on a daily basis. But if you’re looking for a cheap (dare I say it, even free) and relatively accessible way to improve your cardiovascular health, consider getting a quick walk in—maybe while listening to Science Quickly? I mean, it’s right there in the name.
We’ll end with a fun story about potatoes—and also tomatoes. Speaking personally, even though I know both of those edibles are technically nightshades, I don’t otherwise lump them together (unless I’m eating french fries and ketchup, obviously). But a study published last Thursday in the journal Cell suggests that potatoes and tomatoes go way back.
Scientists already knew that potatoes were closely related to a group of plants native to Chile, but while they’re genetically quite similar, those tater relatives don’t actually produce tubers, which is kinda what makes a potato a potato. According to a new analysis of genomes from 450 cultivated potatoes and 56 wild potato species, modern spuds may exist because of an ancient hybridization event between those tuberless plants, called Etuberosum, and the tomato.
Etuberosum and tomatoes diverged from a common ancestor a whole 14 million years ago, according to the researchers, which isn’t surprising if you’ve eaten both tomatoes and potatoes. But the new study suggests that they interbred some five million years after the big split. The researchers say potatoes got their SP6A gene—which is apparently what signals them to produce tubers—from their tomato roots, so to speak, while their IT1 gene—which is involved in controlling the growth of underground stems—[came] from the Etuberosum side. Both parents were crucial for producing the starchy lumps we know and love today.
That’s all for this week’s science news roundup. We’ll be back on Wednesday to talk about why NASA’s future may be in peril.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great week!