neil degrasse tyson (astrophysicist/americanmuseum of natural history): on this episode of nova sciencenow: we humans have alwaysbeen obsessed with the moon. neil armstrong (archival footage): that'sone small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. neil degrasse tyson: and ever since we tookthat first step onto its surface, we've wondered if it could one day be our home away fromhome. daniel andrews (nasa ames research center):we want to move to longer stays, to habitation. neil degrasse tyson: but to live on the moon,we need to find water there. and a new nasa mission is on the hunt.
so this is lcross? they're going to smash an empty rocket intoa lunar crater at 5,600 miles per hour. if the explosion reveals enough hidden water,it could make motels on the moon a lot more likely. anthony colaprete (nasa ames research center):...water, that's why we're going. neil degrasse tyson: and what if somebodycalled you a birdbrain? wouldn't you be insulted? ofer tchernichovski (the city college of newyork): oh, a great compliment! einstein (a parrot): hello! ofer tchernichovski: the bird brain is a verygood brain.
neil degrasse tyson: so good, a bird braincame up with this. chad cohen (correspondent): so that's beethoven'sfifth, out of the mouth of a wood wren. neil degrasse tyson: now these clever creaturesare helping us solve the mystery of how humans learn to talk. juan uriagereka (university of maryland):for an organism that is so distant from us, that's quite remarkable. nature is playinga very slick trick, right there. neil degrasse tyson: also, we'll take you2,000 feet below the surface of the earth on an underground hunt in search of ancientlife. ziya tong (correspondent): so these wallsare just pure salt?
jack griffith (university of north carolina):pure salt. neil degrasse tyson: hidden within these wallsare salt crystals that could hold the remains of microbes older than any organic matterever found on earth. jack griffith: that liquid was trapped a quarterof a billion years ago, so these are little microscopic time capsules. neil degrasse tyson: all that and more onthis episode of nova sciencenow. moon smasherneil degrasse tyson: hi, i'm neil degrasse tyson, your host for nova sciencenow. forty years ago, humans landed on the moon.we went back five more times, but stayed only
a few days each trip. many of us hope thatsomeday we can stay longer, establish a permanent base here, maybe even use it as a rest stopfor interplanetary travel. but if that's going to fly, the moon's got to give us a littlemore help by providing some basic resources. one major resource nasa hopes to find, anyday now, is water. who can deny it? we all have a certain fascinationwith destruction. explosions, collisions, they're an undeniable guilty pleasure. andfor a lucky few at nasa, destruction is actually part of their job description. peter schultz (brown university): i blastthings. i've done this since i've been a kid. that's exactly what i'm doing now. i'm a grownup,and i still play in the sandbox. i get to
throw things at very high velocity. neil degrasse tyson: this is peter schultz'splayground: the vertical gun range at nasa's ames research center, in northern california.for more than 30 years, schultz and his team have been loading projectiles into this 30-footsteel barrel, mounted on a lifting arm. they then fire them into small models of planetarysurfaces. so this is the gun, huh? pete schultz: yeah, yeah, this is the biggun. neil degrasse tyson: but it looks like a contraption,like something out of jules verne. pete schultz: it was made in the '60s, sothis is at the birth of apollo. this is when...this
is the type of gun that they made to try andunderstand the moon. neil degrasse tyson: the surface of the moon? pete schultz: the surface of the moon. neil degrasse tyson: getting to the moon andcolonizing it have always been the target of human obsession. but it was 1969, beforewe really started to understand the moon firsthand. neil armstrong (archival footage): i'm goingto step off the lem, now. that's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. neil degrasse tyson: exciting as that firststep was, the moon looked pretty bleak. in the nearly 50 pounds of moon rocks broughtback by armstrong, aldrin and collins, scientists
found hardly any ingredients—like nitrogen,hydrogen and carbon dioxide—that are essential to support human life. and without the mostimportant of them, water, the moon would forever remain hostile to human colonization. lunar scientists had long theorized that largestores of water might have accumulated on the moon, just as they did on earth, depositedby the impacts of comets. but they believed any water near the surface, exposed to thesun, would have long since evaporated. in 1998, nasa launched lunar prospector, a smallspacecraft designed to orbit the moon pole-to-pole. it carried a highly sensitive spectrometer,a device tuned to detect hydrogen, a possible sign of water, to a depth of three feet, evenin areas of permanent darkness.
and in the darkest craters, near the moon'spoles, prospector struck the mother lode: signs of water, up to six billion tons ofthe stuff. this hint of water changed the game in an instant. daniel andrews: water makes up, sort of, thefoundational building blocks for living on the land on the moon. a half-liter bottleof water, on average, might cost $15,000 to bring it to the moon. that's crazy. what ifthe water was there? you could be using it to create fuel and use the moon as a launchingpoint to go to other places. neil degrasse tyson: so, for nasa, findingwater on the moon may in fact be the next big step toward space colonization. but beforewe can think about living up there, we have
to make sure we know where the water is. andnasa has a new mission aimed at doing just that. stephen hixson (northrop grumman corporation):this is lcross. neil degrasse tyson: meet lcross, nasa's nextbig step in the hunt for lunar water. it looks like this ring, right, with justthese things stuck on it. stephen hixson: it actually looks like a sewerpipe. neil degrasse tyson: short for lunar craterobservation and sensing satellite, lcross is a small and simple spacecraft, designedto sit on top of the upper stage of its launch rocket and take control of the rocket whenit's empty.
lcross's purpose is to smash that school-bus-sizedempty rocket stage into a dark lunar crater at 5,600 miles an hour. the impact will tossthe crater's contents high up into the sunlight, where lcross can analyze them in great detail,and perhaps find new proof of lunar water. remember pete schultz's vertical gun? well,its purpose is to prepare nasa to experience on earth what lcross will encounter on itsmoon mission. to do that, schultz's team loads a projectilethat will act as a stand-in for the empty rocket stage that lcross will throw at themoon. then they stand back and watch what happens inside the chamber. so we're about to go in here, but tell me,first, the gun's not loaded.
pete schultz: let me check. neil degrasse tyson: inside the chamber, whichwill later be drained of air to mimic the moon's lack of atmosphere, schultz prepareshis own little mini-diorama of the lunar surface, using an array of highly specialized gear. this is not the surface of the moon, becauseit's smooth. pete schultz: that's right, so now we haveto make some craters, so... neil degrasse tyson: that's the fun part. pete schultz: yep, that's right. neil degrasse tyson: the whole idea here isto recreate the situation that lcross will
observe when it flies through the dust plumecreated by the impact of its empty rocket stage. it takes about 20 minutes to suck the airout of the chamber. the tension builds, then comes the moment of, well, silence. hey, there'sno sound in a vacuum, all right? but the results are still impressive. pete schultz: look at this! see this? that'sthe red stuff, and now that's coming into light. neil degrasse tyson: into sunlight? pete schultz: into sunlight, and you're seeingthe ejecta.
neil degrasse tyson: and the red stuff isglowing red-hot. when the simulation is slowed down, the beautyand complexity of the plume become apparent. it won't just be a big pile of moon dirt.it'll be a delicate trumpet-shaped curtain of lunar dust, spreading out from the centerof the impact site. it is beautiful, but how will nasa be ableto tell what it's made of and if there is water to be found? in this makeshift lab,team members are using some inexpensive drugstore supplies to test what lcross will see whenit analyzes the impact's dust curtain. anthony colaprete: however, the lunar dustis quite fine, like baby powder, so it's not too far an analog-...
neil degrasse tyson: wait, wait, wait. what'sthis thing? anthony colaprete: that's a vibrator. neil degrasse tyson: i've seen these. thisfeels good. anthony colaprete: it does feel good. neil degrasse tyson: as the baby powder isshaken through the sieve, the team tests how the sun's light will be reflected and scatteredwhen it passes through the dust to lcross's optical spectrometers. so what you're really doing is exploitingthe fact that the sunlight is coming through the dust, in order to analyze the dust itself?
anthony colaprete: that's right. neil degrasse tyson: as sunlight passes throughthe dust curtain, the compounds in the dust absorb specific frequencies of light. lcross'soptical spectrometers measure which frequencies are absorbed, and from those measurements,scientists can tell exactly what the dust is made of. if lcross is lucky, it will seea telltale signature like this, indicating... anthony colaprete: ...water. that's why we'regoing. daniel andrews: we want to move from justsorties to longer stays, to habitation. neil degrasse tyson: launched just last month,lcross sat on top of a two-stage rocket. about two hours after liftoff, the primary payloadwas sent on its way. next, instead of throwing
away the empty second stage, tiny lcross heldonto it. this will be its projectile. then, lcross began shepherding this empty spacejunk in two huge orbits, out past the moon and all the way back around the earth. thisslingshot trajectory is required to get lcross and its projectile up to speed and lined upperfectly with the target crater near the moon's north pole. then comes the final delicatedance. anthony colaprete: eight hours prior to impact,we let go of that upper stage of the rocket, the centaur, and we watch it as it goes inand impacts. when it impacts, it makes an explosion. our little shepherding spacecraftnow becomes an observing spacecraft. eventually, we actually fly through the plume itself,making measurements the whole time, and impact
ourselves. neil degrasse tyson: about two and a halfmonths after launch, lcross will meet its demise. and if it does hit its mark, the resulting40-mile-high debris plume should be visible from earth through an amateur telescope. andin one fleeting instant, the lcross team will know success or failure. but on a grander scale, much more is at stake.if lcross does find water, we may just be looking at the first rest-stop on our wayto the stars. secrets in the saltneil degrasse tyson: in ancient egypt, they used salt to preserve their dead. it workedso well, bodies thousands of years old are
still around today, looking pretty good, too.well, now researchers are uncovering evidence that salt has preserved life forms much olderthan any pharaoh. correspondent ziya tong explores a place where the ultimate naturalpreservative may enshroud remnants of life a quarter-billion years old. ziya tong: at a high-security government facility,in the middle of the new mexico desert, a team of experts are getting ready for an expedition.microbiologist jack griffith, biologist bonnie baxter and research analyst smaranda wilcoxhave agreed to take me with them to a place few people ever get a chance to see. after gearing up, we're escorted to an oldindustrial elevator which will take us 2,000
feet below the surface of the earth. there's no h for "hell" button. we're going on an underground hunt, in searchof ancient life. so how far deep do you think we are, in termsof time, as we're going down? jack griffith: it's about two million yearsper second. ziya tong: two million years a second thatwe're heading down? jack griffith: past the dinosaurs. bonnie k. baxter (westminster college): there'sa dinosaur. jack griffith: so in a way, this is a timemachine, a very fast time machine.
ziya tong: a time machine that descends throughlayer after layer of ancient rock. finally we stop, get out and find ourselvessmack in the middle of a salt formation over a quarter of a billion years old. imagine planet earth, 253 million years b.c.:a world before the age of dinosaurs, even before flowering plants. true mammals hadn'tevolved yet, but the insect population is thriving. it was during this time period, known as thepermian, that the salt deposit was formed. it started out as an enormous salt lake inthe middle of an intensely hot desert. dennis powers (university of mississippi):two-hundred-fifty-million years ago, it would
have been just absolutely miserable. the temperaturemight have been 140 degrees. ziya tong: all that heat caused the lake todry up, leaving behind an enormous pile of salt, hundreds of miles wide. over time, thesalt got buried under a 1,500 foot layer of rock, where it remained isolated and protectedfrom the catastrophic events that were about to change the face of planet earth forever. the permian world ended with the most devastatingextinction event of all time. most forms of life died off, and scientists still aren'tsure why. but, down here, the team believes, remnants of this mysterious time period hada chance to survive, buried in crystals of salt, an idea originally inspired by bonnie'swork. for over a decade she's studied how
salt crystals form in salt lakes. bonnie baxter: in modern salt that we collectfrom the shores of great salt lake, we find lots of microbes, bacteria and things likethat, that live inside the salt crystals. ziya tong: that's because, as salt crystalsform, microscopic pockets of water often get trapped inside, and with it, salt-loving microbes.that got bonnie thinking, "could ancient microbes from the permian have survived the same way?" jack griffith: it opens up a door to thisworld that existed a quarter of a billion years ago. ziya tong: a door that could fill in missingpieces of the evolution of life on the planet.
but to do that, the team needed access toancient salt. it turns out, the u.s. government has plentyof it. back in the 1990s the department of energy hollowed out miles and miles of tunnelsright through this permian salt formation. what is the d.o.e. doing with miles of undergroundtunnels? they use it to store radioactive waste. so this is, like, nuclear waste? roger nelson (united states department ofenergy): this is radioactive waste resulting from the production of atomic bombs. you'relooking at the legacy of the cold war between the u.s. and the soviet union.
ziya tong: a legacy the d.o.e. believes isbest kept deep below the surface of the earth. but, for scientists, these underground tunnelsserve a very different purpose, providing rare access to salt that's been buried undera protective layer of rock for hundreds of million of years. so these walls are just pure salt? jack griffith: pure salt. the reddish is somesulfur deposits, then the browner areas contain clays. so, what we're looking for are someof these little areas that are clear, because the clear area very likely contains possiblyd.n.a., bacteria, we don't know. ziya tong: right.
jack griffith: yeah. so, there's a piece. ziya tong: wow. jack griffith: i'll have a piece too. ziya tong: it tastes... jack griffith: ...just like salt. ziya tong: pretty much just like the modernstuff, huh? jack griffith: it does. it does. probablyin a french restaurant it would be very pricey. ziya tong: yeah, i imagine so. jack griffith: of course we don't know what'sin it.
ziya tong: i wonder what you could get forthis on ebay. soon we were joined by geologist dennis powers.he's spent years studying this formation. jack griffith: what do you think, dennis?are we in a good area here? dennis powers: yeah, we'll just follow thisline along here. you see the light shining into the crystals, and it starts to disperseout, and the whole wall lights up here, just like that. that would be the kind of placewe want to sample, jack. ziya tong: they mark a spot where the saltcrystals are clear and drill several inches into the wall to remove them. what we wereabout to unearth literally hadn't seen the light of day for over a quarter of a billionyears.
it looks like those rock sugar candies thati used to eat. bonnie baxter: it's so clear, look at that.you can see right through it. ziya tong: there's little bubbles in there,huh? jack griffith: little bubbles, we'll haveto see what they are. ziya tong: it takes a few minutes for us toget back to the surface, where i can finally get a better look at the mysterious tiny bubblesthe team came here to find. jack griffith: can you see the little bubbleas we rotate the crystal? ziya tong: yeah. jack griffith: that cavity and the othersare full of liquid, and that liquid was trapped
a quarter of a billion years ago, when thesalt deposit was formed. so these are little and the hope was that, perhaps, these tinyliquid time capsules might contain biological molecules that were synthesized before thegreat permian extinction, 250 million years ago. ziya tong: ancient liquid, older than thedinosaurs, even older than flowering plants. but does it really contain remnants of ancientlife inside? back home in north carolina, jack is determined to find out. at the griffithlab, that means devising a way to photograph what's inside these tiny time capsules withan electron microscope, a difficult and delicate process.
jack is renowned for his extraordinary imagesof the smallest of things, like d.n.a. and protein. bonnie baxter: he is simply the best personin the world to photograph tiny molecules of life. ziya tong: smaranda starts by sterilizingthe salt crystals. smaranda willcox (university of north carolina):we put the salt crystals in this very potent acid mix. the acid will eat away anythingthat's on the surface, and then i look at the crystal. ziya tong: cracks mean modern contaminantshave a chance of getting inside, so those
crystals are discarded. then they drill atiny hole, the size of a cat's whisker, right into the tiny time capsule. now it's timeto remove the ancient liquid and discover whether any remnants of life have actuallysurvived a quarter of a billion years. jack griffith: the sample was covered withthese fibrous materials that you see here. a lot of it looks like some pasta... jack griffith: ...that had been laid downin flat sheets. and we've never seen this before. ziya tong: well, what are we looking at here? jack griffith: well, we didn't know becausewe've been doing this for 30 years, this was
new. so the question is what was it? bonnie baxter: we were absolutely flabbergasted. smaranda willcox: it was a stretch of imagination,really, to come up with what it could be. ziya tong: no one ever suspected that thesepasta-like noodles were, in fact, ancient cellulose. jack griffith: we think d.n.a., we think proteins,we think about r.n.a., but we had never really thought about cellulose, and so this was quitea surprise. ziya tong: but maybe it shouldn't have been,when you realize that every year the planet produces a hundred gigatons of the stuff.
cellulose is a long chain of sugar molecules;it's produced by some forms of bacteria who live on it. but this tough little moleculeis best know as the main component of the cell walls of all green plants, from algae,to leaves, to grass and trees. cellulose has the honor of being the mostcommon organic compound on earth. two-hundred-fifty-million years ago, the landscape was positively overflowingwith it. what you've captured here is the actual... jack griffith: is the real... ziya tong: ...organic material. jack griffith: this is the real, actual organicmolecules that are a quarter of a billion
years old, so these are clearly the oldestdirect evidence of life on the planet. fossils go back into the billions of years, but you'restill looking at rock casts. jack griffith: you can't do any biologicaltests on fossils. that's what's really most exciting about this material, that, not onlycan you see it, but you can actually do things with it in the test tube. as new modern methods get better and better,there could be secrets that we could discover in the nature of cellulose that could tellus about many features of this ancient world. bird brainsneil degrasse tyson: you know, the ability to speak is one of those things that makesus humans think we're special.
einstein: special. neil degrasse tyson: but researchers havestruggled to figure out exactly how we got this talent. einstein: talent. neil degrasse tyson: because learning to speaka language takes a lot more than just mindlessly parroting what someone else says. einstein: mindless. neil degrasse tyson: now, as correspondentchad cohen reports, we're finding new clues in the brains of some animals, who have thelanguage ability to even rival our own.
einstein: split infinitive! chad cohen: it's a skill that comes naturallyto even the tiniest among us. we take in sounds, repeat them and learn to talk. we're so goodat it, we can even do it in more than one language, like these little new yorkers, whoare learning french even before they've mastered english. and yet we still don't understandhow. it's a mystery scientists are starting tounravel by studying a brain about 1,000 times smaller than our own, a brain that's gottena really bad rap. if someone calls you a birdbrain how wouldyou feel? ofer tchernichovski: oh, a great compliment!the bird brain is a very good brain.
chad cohen: ofer tchernichovski, one of theworld's leading experts in birdsong, thinks the term "birdbrain" is a real misnomer. infact he believes the key to solving the mystery of speech lies in the notes of a bird's song. ofer tchernichovski: by looking at the songand see how the song develop, you can understand, sometimes, very basic principles of how ourbrain works and how our mind works. chad cohen: in his lab, ofer studies an australiansongbird called a zebra finch. ofer tchernichovski: now you can actuallysee them side by side. chad cohen: it turns out, this tiny bird learnsto sing much like we learn to speak. ofer tchernichovski: in the beginning, thebird will start singing a very faint, unstructured
song, similar to babbling in human infants. chad cohen: it then starts to mimic the soundsit hears from the adults around it, a lot like we do. mom: can you say ham? see the ham? baby: ham. ofer tchernichovski: so birds are vocal learners,and vocal learning is very rare in nature. chad cohen: while zebra finches learn onlyone song, other songbirds, like canaries, can learn new songs seasonally. some hummingbirdslearn songs more bug-like then bird-like. and parrots, like this one named einstein...
einstein: hello. chad cohen: ...can even mimic other species... trainer: can you do a pig? einstein: oink, oink, oink, oink. chad cohen: ...adding new words to their repertoireall the time. trainer: what does everyone say in tennessee? einstein: yahoo! chad cohen: einstein seems content to receivea treat for displaying his vocal talents. in the wild though, male songbirds use theirsong to defend territory or to woo a mate.
the guy with the best song gets the girl,but to get her, he's got to be creative... ofer tchernichovski: every individual birdhas his own song, has his own performance, so they imitate, but they also diverge andvary. chad cohen: ...and in the process, createrather sophisticated melodies. ofer tchernichovski: so here is a song ofa veery. let's listen to it a little. does it sound musical to you? chad cohen: it sounds like a bird. ofer tchernichovski: okay, i'll slow it downfor you. chad cohen: that's incredible. that's incredible.that's the same bird?
birdsong is so elegant it's inspired the greatmasters. mozart borrowed these notes from his beloved starling. when his muse died,the distraught maestro even gave it a formal funeral and wrote a poem in its honor. ofer tchernichovski: let me play you somethingand see if it reminds you of a piece of music, okay? chad cohen:okay. ofer tchernichovski: so here is a wood wrensong. chad cohen: da da da da. so, that's beethoven'sfifth out of the mouth of a wood wren. that's just crazy. that's just crazy.
ofer tchernichovski: beethoven was reallya fraud, huh? chad cohen: yeah. so which came first, though? ofer tchernichovski: he came first, i cantell you that, at least a few thousand years earlier. chad cohen: duke university neurologist erichjarvis thinks we have a lot more in common with songbirds than first meets the ear. he'sbeen studying bird brains and comparing them with ours. erich jarvis (duke university): the basicsimilarity between songbirds and humans is that we both have cerebral brain areas thatcontrol learned vocal behavior.
chad cohen: so, if you look at the cerebralareas of my brain, for example, this area back here helps me understand the words ihear. whereas, a little bit further up, this area helps me produce the actual words. it'staking no less then 100 muscles, by the way, just for me to be telling you this. and beforei can utter a single word, that word-understanding area and that word-producing area need totalk to each other through some sophisticated circuitry. a songbird's brain also has areas that processand produce sound, and these areas are also connected through sophisticated circuitry. juan uriagereka: for an organism that is sodistant from us, that's quite remarkable.
nature is playing a very slick trick, rightthere. chad cohen: a trick that dr. santosh helekaris using to help unravel the mystery of speech. he's exploring a troubling speech disorder... dennis (speech therapy patient): i love to,to, to, to, to, to... chad cohen: ...stuttering, a condition thatcauses patients, like dennis, to get stuck on syllables. believe it or not, santosh thinksthat some of his zebra finches have a similar problem. yep, it appears songbirds stutter,too. santosh helekar (baylor college of medicine):a normal birdsong of a zebra finch consists of a sequence of syllables that are repeatedover and over again.
chad cohen: this is the sonogram of a normalzebra finch song. a simple melody, consisting of several syllables repeated over and overagain. but santosh's stuttering birds sing like this. they get stuck on one syllable and keep repeatingit over and over again, not unlike what's happening to dennis. henning voss (weill cornell medical college):hi, santosh. how are you? santosh helekar: hi, henning. how are you?i brought some birds. chad cohen: to find out why, santosh, alongwith colleague henning voss of the weill medical college of cornell, decide to scan the brainsof these pint-size stutterers.
to do it, they have to adapt an fmri machine,designed for a human brain, to scan one a lot smaller. henning creates this coil todo the job. once the tiny patient is mildly sedated, it'sput inside the coil and into a soundproof box, equipped with headphones. then bird,box and all, are placed into the fmri and the scanning begins. henning voss: we will see the brain from theside. chad cohen: they soon pick up a signal. henning voss: this is the forebrain, the cerebellum.here, one can see midbrain and spinal cord coming out, and the beak.
chad cohen: now it's time for the entertainmentportion of our program. the tiny patient is played a familiar melody,the song of its father, who first taught him how to sing. as it listens, the scanner picks up increasedblood flow in the part of the brain used to process sound. henning voss: okay, we have very nice activations... santosh helekar: ...smack in the middle ofthe hearing center of the brain. chad cohen: the scans show nice activation,but when they compare the results of these stuttering birds with scans of normal birds,they find a difference.
santosh helekar: a stuttering bird's braindoesn't have the same pronounced activation as a normal bird has. chad cohen: and here's where it gets reallyinteresting. it turns out, similar activation patterns are found in human stutterers. stutterershave less activity in an area of the brain used to process sound than normal speakersdo. this connection between human brains and birdbrains poses yet another question for researchers: how did two distinctly different species endup with, not only intriguingly similar vocal learning systems, but similar speech disorders?the answer may lie in our genes. back in the 1990s, researchers found a geneticlink to language, when they discovered an
english family suffering from a rare speechdisorder. interviewer: where do you live laura? laura: (inaudible) robert c. berwick (massachusetts instituteof technology): this family had extreme difficulty with vocalization, moving their mouths aroundthe right way, with putting the sounds in the right order. chad cohen: genetic studies revealed a singlegene mutation was the cause. the faulty gene, called foxp2, was christened "the languagegene." erich jarvis: that discovery prompted myselfand constance scharff, a longtime collaborator
of mine, to examine whether or not somethingwas similar in songbirds. constance scharff (free university of berlin):do birds have the foxp2 gene? because that wasn't clear at the time. chad cohen: well, they not only found thefoxp2 gene in birds, they discovered how it influences the way a bird learns to sing. erich jarvis: when the young birds are learninghow to imitate songs, the foxp2 gene was going up. chad cohen: this enabled cells to producemore protein. erich jarvis: and after learning was complete,it went down. not only that, we found that
in canaries, who can continue to learn songthroughout life, at the time of the year they're learning to imitate new songs, the foxp2 genegoes up again. chad cohen: an amazing discovery that bringswith it a whole other set of questions. foxp2 is found in just about everything from fishto yeast. constance scharff: even in flies and bees.so it's not the gene that makes us speak. it's a gene that is being used in many neighborhoods. chad cohen: erich jarvis, for one, is committedto figuring this out. he's set his sights on identifying other genes that may hold thekey to why we can speak, birds can sing and others, even our closest relatives, cannot.
it's not for lack of communication skills.since the 1970s, researchers have demonstrated that chimps understand our words and can evenanswer back. erich jarvis: chimps have this ability ofsign language. they already have language with the hands, they just can't do it withthe voice. chad cohen: jarvis theorizes that a few unknowngenes give us something the chimps don't have, that neural circuitry connecting the word-understandingarea of our brain to the word-producing area. without this circuitry, he surmises, chimpscan't speak. erich jarvis: it's not such a crazy idea tothink that a few genes have to be mutated to get such a system in the brain.
chad cohen: a system that gives us the giftof gab and our feathered friends inspiring melodies. juan uriagereka: i love these little guys,but now doubly so, because they're a model organism. we can seriously study them. chad cohen: whether it's through words orsong, one thing's for certain. we aren't the only ones with something to say. trainer: how about a chimpanzee? einstein: ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ah, ah. profile: lonnie thompsonneil degrasse tyson: most people, if they're
packing for a trip to the tropics, they'rethinking, "beach, palm trees...so i'll bring the bathing suit, the flip flops." but guesswhat? the tropics are more than beaches. in fact, they have glaciers, ice, covering hugemountain ranges. in this episode's profile, we meet a scientistwho loves the tropics, but whenever he goes, he's packing a parka and a giant ice pick. why would this 60-year old scientist put himselfthrough this: 33 years of grueling treks, punishing altitudes and frigid temperatures? mark bowen (author, thin ice: unlocking thesecrets of climate in the world's highest mountains): lonnie has spent more time above18,000 feet than any human in history.
neil degrasse tyson: is he a thrill-seeker? lonnie thompson (the ohio state university):uh, no, i'm very much not a thrill-seeker. neil degrasse tyson: so why has he scaledremote tropical mountains in 15 countries on five continents for more than 30 years?glaciologist lonnie thompson is after this: ice cores. ray bradley (university of massachusetts climatesystem research center): lonnie reminds me of clark kent, that superman character, where,at home, he's mild-mannered, and then, suddenly, he learns about an ice cap that has an interestingrecord, and he tears off his shirt, and he suddenly becomes "tropical ice core man."
neil degrasse tyson: lonnie makes these harrowingtreks because he knows that the ice cores he drills contain significant data about climatechange. lonnie thompson: that's really what i likeabout ice. there are so many different questions that you can address by reading the historythat is recorded in the ice fields of the world. unfortunately, that history is meltingin today's world. neil degrasse tyson: which is why lonnie isa man with a mission. global warming is melting glaciers around this planet at an acceleratingpace. that is exactly what's happening to this ice cap in peru, the place where lonnie'scareer really took off. it was here, at the quelccaya ice cap, inthe 1970s, that lonnie began to pioneer a
new scientific discipline: tropical alpinepaleoclimatology, the study of climate history using tropical mountain glaciers. as a young scientist, it occurred to lonniethat tropical ice cores might provide climate information the poles could not. lonnie thompson: we need to understand someother processes, like el niã±os and monsoons. you know, you can't, you wouldn't go to thepolar regions to capture those, those are tropical phenomenon. neil degrasse tyson: with quelccaya and hisother glaciers disappearing fast, lonnie's archive at ohio state university may soonbe the only place to find tropical ice.
he and his team have amassed four miles ofit, an archive of global climate history dating back 700,000 years. it almost looks like readingtea leaves, but, in fact, the ice is chock full of microscopic data for lonnie's teamto analyze. annual layers of ice collect dust particles,bubbles of gas, bacteria, pollen and other clues. from this information, the team formsa picture of a slice in time. when they compare records from around theworld, from long before the vikings through the industrial age, they can create a timelinethat tells the climate story of our planet. lonnie thompson: and it's amazing that theice is such a fantastic recorder of these, that you can actually see the increase inthings like sulfate rising through industrialization.
but you can also see the passage of the cleanair act in 1970 and the reduction in sulfate, after that. neil degrasse tyson: though the stakes maybe higher today, lonnie's fascination with the earth's climate began when he was justa kid in gassaway, west virginia. one of lonnie's science teachers loaned him equipment to builda weather station, which he set up in his sister's horse barn. regina thompson-bobo (lonnie thompson's daughter):i think, well, "what was i doing at that age?" you know? listening to music and thinkingabout m.t.v., and i just picture my dad, like, in the top of a barn figuring out what theweather is going to be, i think it's pretty
neat. neil degrasse tyson: scientific curiosityseemed to come naturally. lonnie thompson: i ran an experiment wheni was in high school, how long i could stay up without sleep. because there were storiesthat if you stayed up, you know, past 70 hours, you'd start seeing pink elephants and thingslike that. and it wasn't true, but i tried it out to find out. neil degrasse tyson: lonnie's mom and dadwere insistent that he do something they never could: go on to college and graduate school. frances thompson (lonnie thompson's mother):you have to have hope. there was a lot of
times our meals were pretty skimpy, you know?and i never allowed them to complain. i said, "now, don't say anything. it could be worse."although, at the moment, i didn't know how it could be worse. neil degrasse tyson: lonnie worked four jobsthrough high school, an effort that became more important after his dad died from a heartailment. just two years later, he lost his sister to a car accident. lonnie thompson: it really brought home, atan early age, the fact that we have no guarantee of how long anyone's life will last. if youwant to do something, you need to get on with it, because the clock's ticking.
neil degrasse tyson: happily for him, lonniemet a plucky fellow scientist who shared his stamina: ellen mosley. ellen mosley-thompson (the ohio state university):well, i thought he was attractive. he seemed very serious. and then after we met, i foundout that he had lots of humor, and we liked a lot of similar things like scary stories,scary movies. neil degrasse tyson: in the 1970s, lonnieand ellen embarked upon the then-new study of ice cores to understand climate. didn'ttake long for lonnie to run up against a defining moment, right before one of his first presentationsto peers. lonnie thompson: one of these fellows tookme aside and told me that if i got up there
and told them that i could date ice core usingdust, that my career was finished and done for. and it really worried me, because i respectedthis fellow. and i just finally said, well, "i'm pretty young, so i'm going to say whati think, and we'll let the chips fall as they may." neil degrasse tyson: scientists assumed tropicalice cores wouldn't give reliable data, because heat would melt the glacial surface, and thefresh water would trickle down and contaminate the ice layers beneath. skeptics also thoughtthese tropical sites were too remote and inhospitable. lonnie thompson: so, i'm really naive abouthow i might do this. probably, that worked in my favor, because i didn't know what iwas getting into.
neil degrasse tyson: finally, the nationalscience foundation took a chance on lonnie's plan. he and ellen put together an internationalteam of committed scientists and support staff. in 1979, with lonnie's reputation on the line,the team headed to peru. lonnie thompson (archival footage): is thisthe quelccaya ice cap now? mark bowen: they went through this amazingexperience in the back country, for three months. they ran out of food twice, they wereeating, you know soup, made of orange peels and the old coca leaves; it was very riskyin many ways. and then they had this miraculous success. the quelccaya ice core reached back about1,500 years. it was an amazingly precise record.
you could see when there were droughts, youcould see when there were big el niã±os. little tips in climate can have disastrous implications. neil degrasse tyson: lonnie's efforts revealthat this glacier, on quelccaya, is typical of the tropics. it's receding, and his teamhas documented that process over decades. when lonnie started, there was no lake here. lonnie thompson: in the first 15 years itwas retreating at about six meters per year, and the last 15 years, it's been over 60 metersper year. so that's a tenfold increase in the rate of which the ice is being lost inthis valley. neil degrasse tyson: but his research is notall that's put lonnie on the map. it's his
ability to see and communicate the implicationsof his findings. lonnie thompson: when you go into the tropics,you've got 70 percent of the 6.5 billion people living on the planet living there. and whenyou go to a country like peru, where 80 percent of its water comes from the glaciers thatproduces the power for the country, the loss of that archive becomes a human issue. thatwater is also used for irrigation, municipal water supplies, and it's all disappearing. it's not so much what we know—though that'sgoing to be very important in dealing with these problems—but it is more the humanspirit that we can when we—at least when we have to—work together to do something.
neil degrasse tyson: now, four decades afterhis start, lonnie has been given the highest recognition for his lifetime of achievement. announcer (film clip): lonnie g. thompson. neil degrasse tyson: he's been awarded thenational medal of science in acknowledgement of his research and his public impact. announcer (film clip): ...national medal ofscience for his primary research. lonnie thompson: i go back, and i think aboutmy childhood growing up in west virginia. and you think about all the choices that youmake along the road that take you in a certain direction, even if you had known, you know,how is it possible that you would make all
these particular choices? sometimes when ilook at it, i think it's kind of a miracle. cosmic perspective – lcross: the searchfor water neil degrasse tyson: and now for some finalthoughts on the search for water. water, of course, is not just a refreshingbeverage. it's got some other useful properties too. you remember that its chemical symbolis h2o. that's one oxygen bound with two hydrogen atoms. the water molecule is remarkably stable,but with a large investment of energy, you can separate the atoms from each other. now, suppose you were an astronaut exploringthe surface of another planet that you knew, in advance, had lots of water. that'd be good,because, apart from drinking the stuff, once
you split the molecule, you'd now have oxygento breathe. not only that, if you bring the oxygen back together with the hydrogen, makingwater once again, then large amounts of energy will spew forth, equal to the energy it tookto break the molecule apart in the first place. it's this reaction that powers the main enginesof the space shuttle. so, pick a cosmic object to visit that haswater, and you only need to bring enough water, oxygen and rocket fuel for the trip there.that's a huge savings in the weight of your spacecraft and in the cost of the mission. nasa calls this "in-situ resource utilization,"but i'd rather call it "the filling-station model" of space exploration, allowing cosmicplaces to no longer be destinations but stepping-stones
to the stars. and that is the cosmic perspective. and now we'd like to hear your perspectiveon this episode of nova sciencenow. log on to our web site and tell us what you think.you can watch any of these stories again, download additional audio and video, exploreinteractives, hear from experts and much more. find us at pbs.org. that's our show. we'llsee you next time.
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