NOVA scienceNOW: August 18, 2009

PBS Airdate: August 18, 2009
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NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON (Astrophysicist\American Museum of Natural History): On this episode of NOVA scienceNOW, a personal D.N.A. test may be all the rage, but how come it told this guy he should be bald?

STEVEN PINKER (Harvard University): What does it mean that I have an 80 percent risk of baldness? I clearly have a zero percent risk of baldness.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Now, he wants to help make D.N.A. tests more useful, and he's doing his part by putting his own genome on the Internet.

STEPHEN COLBERT (The Colbert Report, 2/11/09 Video Clip): You had your genome sequenced and then you put it on the Internet? Are you crazy? That's like posting the Social Security number that God gave you. I mean...

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Is he helping humankind? Or taking a terrible risk?

RUDOLPH E. TANZI (Massachusetts General Hospital): Until I know for sure there's absolutely no discrimination, I don't want my name associated with my D.N.A. sequence.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: And it's food, it's face cream, it's algae. The stuff is everywhere.

KRIS NIYOGI (University of California Berkeley): I can even hold a Petri dish out the window here and catch algae right out of the air.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: And it's crucial for making the oxygen we breathe.

KRIS NIYOGI: If algae had never come along, humans would never exist.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: But can high-tech inventors harness the power of pond scum to put cleaner fuel in your car?

KRIS NIYOGI: That oil can be, very easily be converted into biodiesel.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Also, deep in the Arctic Ocean we're finding new kinds of life.

TIMOTHY SHANK (Evolutionary Biologist, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution): They're unlike anything we've seen before.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: It's a practice run in the search for alien creatures on Jupiter's frozen moon, Europa.

TIMOTHY SHANK: We're trying to figure out: can we sense blood? Can we sense carbon? Can we sense the amino acids that might be there for primordial life in a Europan ocean? It's amazing stuff.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: All that and more on this episode of NOVA scienceNOW.

Funding for NOVA scienceNOW is provided by The National Science Foundation, where discoveries begin. And...

Discover new knowledge; biomedical research and science education; Howard Hughes Medical Institute: HHMI.

And the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to enhance public understanding of science and technology and to portray the lives of men and women engaged in scientific and technological pursuit.

And the George D. Smith Fund.

And by PBS viewers like you. Thank you.

PUBLIC GENOMES

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Hi, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your host of NOVA scienceNOW.

It seems like every week, scientists uncover more secrets of our D.N.A., revealing how our genetic code can help shape and influence our lives. And for some, this is scary, raising fears that insurance companies or employers might see our genetic profile and hold it against us.

(As Bureaucrat): Well, Mr. deGrasse Tyson, I've seen your genetic profile, and it's not pretty. In fact, you're much too much of a genetic risk for us.

But some say that knowing our genetic risk for disease will actually lead us to longer, healthier lives.

(As Doctor): Well, Neil, I've reviewed your genome. Here are my recommendations. And we've prepared a bottle of vitamins specially for you.

Well, thank you!

(As Doctor): Live long and prosper.

So what can genetic testing actually tell us about our chances for a long and healthy life? And will that knowledge help us or hurt us?

It's Time Magazine's invention of the year. No, it's not the electric car or the bionic hand. It's not even Hulu. It's the personal D.N.A. test.

A bunch of new companies are claiming they can read your D.N.A. and tell you all kinds of things about yourself. And it seems everybody wants to know what might be hidden in their genes. Larry King, the founders of Google, supermodel Naomi Campbell, and Ivanka Trump...they've all signed up to get their D.N.A. done.

But what can these tests really tell you about you?

To find out, I got one of the tests. There was just one thing I needed to do.

Spit.

ELISSA LEVIN (Navigenics, Inc.): You have agreed to provide us with a saliva sample, and...

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Spit?

ELISSA LEVIN: Spit, correct.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: All I had to do was spit into a tube and send it to a lab in California, where they extracted my D.N.A.

D.N.A. is made of long strings of four chemicals, best known by their initials, A, C, G and T. The six billion letters in a human genome encode the instructions for building our bodies and keeping them running.

Everybody's D.N.A. is mostly the same. Here and there, a letter or more will be different.

DIETRICH STEPHAN (Navigenics, Inc.): Those subtle variations are what make you and I unique and different. But, it's also what predisposes individuals, subtly, to these common diseases.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: This lab compared the letters of my D.N.A. to the letters of people who have some common diseases, and then predicted my chances of my getting sick.

That would tell me I'm at a higher risk than the population, on average?

They said I had less than a 5 percent chance of getting Alzheimer's disease, but more than a 25 percent chance of getting diabetes or having a heart attack in my lifetime.

I wondered what all these percentages really meant. So I asked my friend, Steven Pinker, Harvard professor of psychology. He had taken the test and got back an even longer list.

Here's one of my favorites.

STEVE PINKER: ...said I have a gene that gives me double the risk of baldness. My risk, based on this single gene, would be 80 percent.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: An 80 percent chance of being bald? Steve's got more hair than your average rock star.

STEVE PINKER: Oh, I get stopped all the time with, "Gee, you look like Jimmy Page...," and Robert Plant and Roger Daltry.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: He was even featured on mulletlovers.com as the...

STEVE PINKER: ...stud mullet.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: So what's up? The invention of the year, a personal D.N.A. test telling Steve Pinker he should be bald?

STEVE PINKER: What does it mean that I have an 80 percent risk of baldness? I clearly have a zero percent risk of baldness.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: And if that seems so wrong, what about the disease risks I was given?

Well, a lot of experts say they're about as accurate as Steve's baldness prediction.

RUDY TANZI: The fact that they're telling people "percent chance" of getting a disease in their life, right now, it's laughable.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: We know that a few diseases, like sickle cell anemia and Huntington's disease, are caused by one faulty gene, and D.N.A. tests do a good job predicting them. But many geneticists, like Rudy Tanzi, say that for most common illnesses, the tests still aren't very useful for prediction.

RUDY TANZI: I don't think it's possible, no matter how much money you spent right now, with any direct D.N.A. service, to get any reliable information about your risk for the most common age-related diseases.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: But why not? Why can't common diseases like cancer and diabetes be predicted by looking at your D.N.A.?

Well, here's the problem:

There's six billion letters in your D.N.A. Strings of these letters can make up a gene. Altogether you have maybe 20,000 genes that tell your cells how to build different proteins, like collagen for your skin or hemoglobin for your blood. Some genes make switches that can turn other genes on or off. Inside our cells, every second, thousands of genes are interacting with one another.

We've now mapped the human genome, so we have a pretty good list of all the different genes. But we don't know how they all work together. It's kind of like a supermarket with thousands of different ingredients. Just as it takes a bunch of different ingredients from the shelves to make a cake, it takes groups of many human genes, all working together, to produce a human trait, like baldness. And it takes another big group to produce a complex illness like heart disease.

STEVE PINKER: We know that the recipe for D.N.A. sequences into flesh and blood is extraordinarily complex. You have one gene that might affect the expression of a second gene, which might modulate the expression of a third gene.

DAVID ALTSHULER (Massachusetts General Hospital): When we say diabetes, or heart attack, or cancer, or asthma are genetic, we mean that there are a lot of genes, they each have often small effects that add up, that lifestyle and environment matter, and a big dose of random chance.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: If the recipes for common diseases are this complicated, can we ever figure them out? Can knowing our D.N.A. ever help us understand disease?

George Church thinks it can. George has launched the Personal Genome Project to gather the evidence to answer all kinds of questions about how our bodies work.

It might reveal why a guy like Steve, who has a gene that's supposed to make him a good jumper and sprinter, is just as lousy at basketball as George, who lacks that gene.

More importantly, the project aims to collect enough D.N.A. data to uncover the true, complex causes of disease.

But first, George needs to convince volunteers to give him their D.N.A.

GEORGE M. CHURCH (Harvard Medical School): We have ten that have actually been through the full experience.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Are you one of the ten?

GEORGE CHURCH: I'm one of the ten. Steve's one of the...

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: He's one of the ten?

GEORGE CHURCH: Steve's one of the ten, yeah. Right.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: So you're telling me our whole understanding of the human race now cues off of the two of you?

GEORGE CHURCH: I, I, I think we need a lot more, a lot more than that.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: When he says a lot more, he means a lot more. He wants to sift through the D.N.A. of 100,000 people.

He might need that many because genetic diseases can involve so many different ingredients, it might take a huge study to reveal them all. And if we're going to decipher the complete recipe for disease, then participants like Steve need to share much more than their D.N.A.

GEORGE CHURCH: To really make this valuable, we can't just have D.N.A. We need to have their traits, as comprehensive a set of traits as possible, so their medical characteristics, their physical characteristics.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: How about the environment? Do you care about their environment?

GEORGE CHURCH: Environment is very important. We want to capture that, too.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: So it's a huge questionnaire, then?

You name it, it's on George Church's questionnaire: past diseases, medications, waist size, what you eat, what you smoke. Researchers want to know all of it, because the recipes for disease include your environment and your behavior, in addition to your genes.

And here's the kicker: George Church wants to put all that information on the Internet.

STEVE PINKER: Someone can, literally, Google my genome. This information will be visible to anyone with an Internet connection, so a billion people will be able to look at my genome.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Steve did opt to keep a gene private, one that involved Alzheimer's Disease, but other than that, his D.N.A. is out there.

STEPHEN COLBERT (The Colbert Report, 2/11/09 Video Clip): Please welcome Steven Pinker. Dr. Pinker.

You had your genome sequenced and then you put it on the Internet. Are you crazy? That's like posting the Social Security number that God gave you.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Colbert is not the only guy who thinks Steve Pinker's crazy.

STEVE PINKER: I think there's a tremendous amount of fear and even paranoia about how our genetic information could be used against us.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: What happens if all that info winds up in the wrong hands, say your health insurance company or your employer?

A new law signed last year, GINA, protects only against some genetic discrimination.

RUDY TANZI: Genetic information is not properly protected yet.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: For example, health insurers can't discriminate based on D.N.A., but life insurers can.

RUDY TANZI: Until I know for sure that someday there's absolutely no discrimination, where there's a, let's say an amendment that one cannot be discriminated against according to race, color, creed, and D.N.A. sequence, until that day, I don't want my name associated with my D.N.A. sequence.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Even beyond discrimination there's another fear – genetic engineering – creating super-babies. We've seen it played out in the movies.

DOCTOR (GATTACA Film Clip): You want to give your child the best possible start. You have specified hazel eyes, dark hair and, uh, fair skin. I've taken the liberty of eradicating any potentially prejudicial conditions, premature baldness, myopia, alcoholism and addictive susceptibility, propensity for violence, obesity. You could conceive naturally a thousand times and never get such a result.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: But Steven Pinker is not worried about genetic engineering, because he's convinced the recipes of life are tough to tinker with.

STEVE PINKER: There's not going to be a stupidity gene or an intelligence gene. There will be hundreds, maybe thousands of genes that, on average, might bump you up a little bit, might bump you down a little bit, and perhaps do other things at the same time.

The more you know about how genes really work, the less paranoid you're apt to be about the prospects of personal genomics.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Steve and George, who have pretty secure employment and decent resources, don't think they have much to lose.

And more than 13,000 volunteers who've signed up for George's project may decide that the risks of making their D.N.A. public are outweighed by the potential benefit to humankind.

DAVID ALTSHULER: The more sequence we capture in people with disease 'til it's complete, and different numbers of people in different populations, we will, I am entirely confident, learn about disease and human biology, and it will prove a very powerful approach to knowing ourselves.

On Screen Text: Isolate human D.N.A. in your kitchen in 4 easy steps, for real:

½ cup water

¼ tsp salt

1 tsp of detergent

Drop of pineapple juice

1 tsp baking soda

Step 2: Rinse your mouth out with water and spit it into a cup.

Step 3: Add them together.

Step 4: Add a little alcohol. (drum roll please): D.N.A.!

Don't try this at home. For detailed instructions and more go to pbs.org.

ALGAE FUEL

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: As we hunt for solutions to our energy needs, there's a simple ingredient that's raising our hopes. It's not animal, it's not mineral, it's not really vegetable. But it's all around us.

Correspondent Andrea Kissick investigates the slimy life form that might provide a promising, carbon-neutral fuel for the future.

ANDREA KISSACK (Correspondent): So, what do this, this and this have in common? Brace yourself: they're all algae.

The earth is home to over 30,000 species of algae, a family of bizarre organisms that are neither plant nor animal. You'll find them from the tropics to the poles. Some are bigger than you, others are too tiny to see with the naked eye. And thanks to a few of the tiniest ones, someday you just might be using algae to fuel your car.

What's so cool about algae?

KRIS NIYOGI: Well, algae are, basically, very efficient solar energy converters, converting the energy of the sun into biomass. They're pretty much everywhere you look. And I can even hold a Petri dish out the window here and catch algae right out of the air, which I can take back to my lab and grow in a growth chamber with lights.

ANDREA KISSACK: So how many of these ancient organisms did we get from sticking our dish out the window for three minutes?

KRIS NIYOGI: You can see there are a lot of colonies on this plate, and I see a couple of green colonies, here. So those are some algae that we caught.

ANDREA KISSACK: And on a good day, how many strains would you expect to find?

KRIS NIYOGI: Basically, half a dozen colonies would be a good day for algae.

ANDREA KISSACK: And a good day for algae is a good day for humans. If algae hadn't started breathing in carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen three and a half billion years ago, none of us would be here.

KRIS NIYOGI: If algae had never come along and produced oxygen for the earth's atmosphere, humans would never exist.

ANDREA KISSACK: Like most plants, algae have mastered a process called photosynthesis. Basically, algae act like little factories. They use the energy in sunlight to pull damaging carbon dioxide out of the air. Then they break down water to manufacture that CO₂ into sugars and fats, and spew oxygen into the air as a waste product. But for the algae, those sugars and fats are what it's all about. They use most of these raw materials to assemble more algae, lots more.

KRIS NIYOGI: So they can double themselves, in some cases, more than once per day.

ANDREA KISSACK: Wow. So it's really gobbling up the CO₂.

KRIS NIYOGI: Yeah.

ANDREA KISSACK: But in certain situations, algae are a bit like us. They can overeat sun energy, and they end up storing the extra energy as oily fat, kind of an algae "spare tire."

And what can we do with that oil?

KRIS NIYOGI: Well, that oil, in many cases, can be very easily converted into biodiesel.

ANDREA KISSACK: And unlike fossil fuels, burning algae-based fuels wouldn't release any new greenhouse gases.

KRIS NIYOGI: Ideally, the overall process will be carbon-neutral. The algae take up carbon dioxide, then that carbon dioxide gets re-released, with no net increase in the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

ANDREA KISSACK: It sounds great as a concept, but it's still not quite ready for primetime. For one thing, algae don't want to give up their precious oil, and they've developed a pretty tough skin to protect it. Getting the oil out isn't easy. And before you can do that, you need to start with a serious volume of algae. And that requires land. How much land? This'll give you an idea...

On the inner shoreline of San Francisco Bay is a network of strangely-colored, shallow, manmade ponds. They're actually massive salt reclamation ponds. But the crazy colors come to you courtesy of various families of wild algae that grow near the surface.

So this is kind of what open algae ponds look like?

ROBERT WALSH (Aurora Biofuels): It is, in terms of the size and, and space they would take up.

ANDREA KISSACK: Massive open ponds have long been considered the cheapest way to grow algae for biofuels. But oil used to be so cheap, it just wasn't worth the effort. Well, that era's over, and algae oil companies like Bob Walsh's Aurora Biofuels are up to their knees in open algae ponds again.

BOB WALSH: Our vision is you're going to have several thousand acres that will produce, you know, 120 million gallons a year, using salt water and land that's barren land, food can't grow.

ANDREA KISSACK: On paper, algae biofuels seem like the answer to everyone's questions. But algae aren't the first biofuel source to be sold as the answer to everything. Remember corn ethanol?

I visited San Francisco's Mission District to get a taste of corn ethanol's dark side.

HOLLY K. GIBBS (Stanford University): The issue is that the biofuels are made from the same things that food is made from today, things like corn or soybeans. And what we're finding is that is leading to rapid increases in food prices.

ANDREA KISSACK: In fact, the 2007 U.S. ethanol mandate translated to a 400 percent increase in the price of corn tortillas, sparking protests in Mexico and elsewhere.

And the dangerous chain reaction continued from there. To cover for U.S. farmland that had changed over to biofuel crops, countries all over the world took up the slack by dedicating new lands to food crops, and they cut down and burned rain forests to do it.

But consider this: burning cleared forests already contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than the total exhaust from every vehicle in the world.

HOLLY GIBBS: The decisions that we make here in the United States are affecting things from food to forests. When we fuel our cars up with biofuels, we are effectively burning rain forests in our gas tanks.

ANDREA KISSACK: But algae ponds are different, aren't they? You don't have to clear forests for them. And algae can grow in brackish or saltwater. You can build ponds where you can't grow crops. But algae takes up a lot of space, usually far from the city.

And the city is where you find factories and power plants, the most concentrated source of algae's favorite food, CO₂. Unfortunately, open algae ponds don't fit well in a landscape like this.

But there are ways to grow your algae indoors. Just plop down an industrial warehouse next to a factory. Then pipe the CO₂ belched out of the factory's smokestacks straight to the hungry algae in the warehouse.

And inside the warehouse you might find something like this. It's a working prototype of a device called a photo bioreactor.

Wow. These are wild. So why all the colored lights?

RIGGS ECKELBERRY (OriginOil, Inc.): The colors are because algae is receptive to blue and red, and really doesn't want to have full spectrum light. The U.V. in the full sunlight is actually damaging to algae.

ANDREA KISSACK: OriginOil's idea is to scale up the individual containers to 10,000 gallons each. A setup like this could generate 1,000 gallons of algae oil per acre per day.

The helix bioreactor is pretty flashy packaging. Some algae scientists call it a "techno-toy" that's just too expensive to provide a large-scale solution. And think about this: if algae biofuels are about harnessing the sun, where's the solar source?

RIGGS ECKELBERRY: The devil's bargain in indoor production of algae is that you are now going to go away from direct sunlight. You've got lights, pumps, chillers, and all these things add up to an energy penalty.

ANDREA KISSACK: For Eckelberry, the added energy costs of supplying indoor light and climate control are worth paying when you compare it the total energy produced by his algae well.

So how soon are we going to run high-powered vehicles like jets on algae biofuel? The answer? Now. In January of 2009, jet fuel refined partly from algae oil was used to power a two-hour experimental flight.

For the growing number of algae biofuel startups around the globe, it was a shining proof of concept. But considering that algae biofuels currently weigh in at a whopping $8 per gallon, it's a pretty tough vision to sell right now.

Still, when weighed against the other biofuels options, it's hard not to get excited about algae's future.

HOLLY GIBBS: Algae has a great deal of potential, and part of the reason is that it overcomes some of these limitations that we saw with the crop-based or land-based biofuels.

We need to be cautious as we move forward. We need to think about some of the unintended consequences, the ripple effects or chain reactions, that we might not be thinking of on the surface. You know, 10 years from now, what is this going to look like?

ANDREA KISSACK: From pond scum to power source: it sounds too good to be true, and it may be. It's still unclear if there's enough land to use open ponds effectively, or if photo bioreactors are just too expensive to scale up to factory size. Still, at the risk of being over-optimistic, isn't there something poetic about the possibility that last week's lowly slime...sushi...face cream may just turn out to be next week's future fuel?

On Screen Text: Where does oil come from?

WOMAN #1: Dinosaur fossils.

WOMAN #2: Rock.

MAN ON BIKE: Dinosaurs.

MAN IN TRUCK: From Venezuela.

On Screen Text: No.

WOMAN #3: From decaying things in the earth.

On Screen Text: Yes! It's mostly...algae! It dies, breaks down where it is trapped, in rock, under heat and pressure for millions of years and becomes oil!

And what would happen if we just left it there?

CONSTRUCTION WORKER: It would stay in the ground.

MAN #1: I don't think anything would happen.

WOMAN #4: That's a good question. I don't know.

On Screen Text: Crude oil does rise to the surface of the earth on its own, where it is eaten by bacteria or evaporates into the atmosphere.

WHAT IF? BLACK HOLE

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: And now for another installment of What If?

Ever wonder what would happen if you fell into a black hole?

First some background: Black holes are regions of space where the gravity is so high that the fabric of space and time has curved back on itself, taking exit doors with it.

NASA (Archival Audio): ...two, one. We have a liftoff!

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Light is the fastest stuff in the universe. Not even light can escape, and if light can't escape, then neither can you, which is why we call these things black holes.

This boundary, within which light cannot escape, we call that the event horizon. All of the stuff within the event horizon has collapsed to an infinitesimal point at the center.

Ready? Here we go. I'm going to fall to the black hole feet first.

As I get closer and closer, the force of gravity grows astronomically, but I can't feel it, because, like anything else in free fall, I'm just weightless.

But I'm starting to feel something else, something sinister.

My feet are closer to the black hole so gravity pulls on them harder than at my head. This difference in force from head to toe is normally tiny, and it goes unnoticed on places like Earth. But in a fall towards a black hole, this stretching force is all you'd notice.

If I were made of rubber, then I'd just stretch. But our bodies are made of things like bones, and muscles and organs. I would stay whole until the stretching force exceeded the molecular bonds of my body's flesh.

At that moment, my body would snap into two segments.

That's not even the worst part. Everything of me that ever was gets funneled to the black hole's center. So, not only have I been ripped in half, I'm being extruded through the fabric of space and time, like toothpaste through a tube.

As I keep falling, the difference in gravity continues to grow, and each of my two body segments snaps into two more segments, and so on, splitting my body into an ever-increasing number of parts, all the way down to the atoms themselves and beyond, leaving an unrecognizable parade of particles that just a few moments earlier had been me!

We have a word for this cause of death: "spaghettification."

Visit pbs.org and send us your What If? questions.

MYSTERY OF THE GAKKEL RIDGE

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: As we explore strange new worlds, seek out new life, the creatures we come across might be so bizarre, thriving in environments totally different from ours, that we could have trouble even recognizing they're alive.

Luckily, there's an exotic world right here in our very own solar system, and as Correspondent Ziya Tong tells us, it might be the perfect spot for us to boldly go.

ZIYA TONG (Correspondent): This is the top of the world, the Arctic Ocean, one of the most remote places on Earth, pretty alien for humans.

But these scientists trekked to this icy badlands, because they're sending vehicles two to three miles under the surface to the Gakkel, an underwater ridge system that may hold clues to the secrets of life.

TIMOTHY SHANK: If you want to understand how evolution has taken place and how we have come to be as human beings on this planet, you want to understand invertebrates and how they have done it, as well.

The truth is we have fantastic diversity of life on our seafloor, and life may have arisen from our seafloor. So I'm looking at how life has evolved in our oceans, particularly in the deep sea.

ZIYA TONG: But the strange thing about this particular exploration is that it's not just about life on this planet. It's also about the search for life on Europa.

What's Europa?

JOHN RUMMEL (Astrobiologist): Europa is a moon of Jupiter. It's one of the four satellites of Jupiter discovered by Galileo back in the 1600s.

ZIYA TONG: We humans have been wondering for a very long time: "Is there life out there?"

JOHN RUMMEL: Well, I think that it takes a really big ego to not consider the possibility.

ZIYA TONG: But why look for life on Europa?

Because of pictures sent back by two NASA vehicles, Voyager and Galileo; very intriguing pictures.

JOHN RUMMEL: We see this cunning little moon of Jupiter, called Europa, about the same size as the earth's moon, that's got an icy surface and probably an ocean twice as big as all the earth's oceans, underneath that ice.

ZIYA TONG: Why's that such a big deal?

Because the search for life begins with water.

TIMOTHY SHANK: We know that there are certain essential elements that you have to have for life to exist: water, rock, and a heat source.

ZIYA TONG: The heat source interacts with compounds in water and rock.

JOHN RUMMEL: The major components that are required for life are carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and sulphur. Those are the big important ones. And until we can look for the presence of all these, then we don't know whether or not Europa actually can have life, based on our current understanding. But it's a very attractive target.

TIMOTHY SHANK: I see no reason why there wouldn't be life on Europa. The trick is how you're going to get there and probe for that life.

PETER GIRGUIS (Marine Biologist, Harvard University): And if we want to go look for life there, we're going to have to develop a new suite of technologies.

Space scientists, in fact, are now turning to oceanographers and saying, "Hey, how do you study underwater hot springs?" Because there may be some on Europa.

ZIYA TONG: So NASA helps support expeditions on Earth that prepare us, and the equipment, to explore Europa. And it turns out, Gakkel Ridge is just the spot.

TIMOTHY SHANK: The most analogous place on our own planet is the Arctic Ocean, the Gakkel Ridge.

JOHN RUMMEL: Gakkel Ridge is very interesting. It's a place sealed off, effectively, from the rest of the ocean system for millions of years.

TIMOTHY SHANK: The continents had moved around to form a basin, basically. And so, whatever's been evolving there has been evolving in isolation for the last 32 million years.

ZIYA TONG: Scientists went to Gakkel Ridge and deployed vehicles to take images and samples two to three miles under the surface.

Part of the scientist's job is to uncover the challenges. Tim and the team uncovered the challenges, like communicating with the autonomous underwater vehicles and working with the ice, which posed daunting obstacles.

TIMOTHY SHANK: The ice can close in on you very rapidly. You could spend hours trying to predict where it's going to go. You're never really sure.

PETER GIRGUIS: How do you tell a vehicle to go explore underneath an ice cap and then maybe collect some samples and come home? I mean that's not an easy task.

ZIYA TONG: So what did they end up finding?

TIMOTHY SHANK: One thing we did find was a, was a new species of octopus, a sea cucumber or some sort of a worm. We found skeletons of a sponge that may be a new species. We found three new volcanoes we didn't know were there before, and the lava on them is very fresh, like they've recently erupted.

ZIYA TONG: And microbes, lots of microbes. Like moss covering a forest floor.

TIMOTHY SHANK: The preliminary data analysis is telling us those microbes are closely related to the bacteria that form the trunk of the evolutionary tree of life. They're unlike anything we've seen before.

ZIYA TONG: Maybe just like we'd find on Europa.

TIMOTHY SHANK: If someone told me, "We went to Europa. We got this footage. Take a look at this." I'd go "Wow."

I wouldn't be surprised to see those kinds of microbial communities.

We're working on a project now to develop sensors to be able to sense life in a Europan ocean. Will animals have blood on Europa? Who knows? We're trying to figure out: can we sense blood? Can we sense carbon? Can we sense the amino acids that might be there for primordial life? It's amazing stuff.

ZIYA TONG: But exactly what we'll find there is a mystery, and that's half the fun.

JOHN RUMMEL: We get to learn about this planet while we're preparing to study others. I think that it's going to be a very interesting ride, one way or the other.

On Screen Text: What's a Gakkel anyway? Yakov Yakovlevich Gakkel,

Ya Ya for short; Soviet explorer and polar geographer. In 1948, he predicted the existence and location of an underwater Arctic mountain range. He was right. The "Gakkel Ridge" was found in 1969.

Well done, comrade.

PROFILE: YOKY MATSUOKA

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Here at NOVA scienceNOW, we've always considered it the epitome of cool to be smart and into science, but sometimes kids think they have to choose between being smart and being popular.

Well, in this episode's profile, you'll meet a popular kid who finally decided to embrace her inner geek, and now she's reaping the rewards.

At age 38, Yoky Matsuoka is finally not afraid to stand out.

At the University of Washington, Yoky is a pioneer in neurobotics, an emerging field that combines neuroscience with building robots. Yoky won the MacArthur "genius" award for this visionary work.

YOKY MATSUOKA (University of Washington): It's easy to describe Star Wars and say, "Remember the scene where Luke goes...and then moves the hand around, and it looks like a real hand, but there's a little door that opens on the arm, and there are all mechanical pieces moving around?" And that's what I make.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Thanks to her, people who need them will someday have prosthetic hands that will look and move like real human hands. And what makes Yoky's hand so remarkable is that it will be controlled directly by the human brain.

RODNEY BROOKS (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): I don't think Yoky's ever just one of the crowd. She's doing stuff that's very different from what other people are doing, and I think she enjoys being out there on the edge.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Growing up in Tokyo, Japan, Yoky always knew somewhere, deep down, she was not like other kids.

YOKY MATSUOKA: I knew that I wasn't the same as everybody else. Somehow, something was different.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Then she found the most unlikely of soul mates.

YOKY MATSUOKA: When I first saw John McEnroe? I bet I was about five or eight. He had a personality that was different from other people. He really stood out. I think that's why he was called the "bad boy" of tennis.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: At age 11, Yoky started playing tennis, too. But as a girl in Japan, she knew she could never be like John McEnroe.

YOKY MATSUOKA: Oh yeah, it's not acceptable to be bold; it's not acceptable to really express your opinions, especially as a girl. I think I was afraid to show that I was different, and I admired people who could show that they are different and not be afraid of it.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Tennis became Yoky's obsession and her identity. And she was good.

When Yoky was 16, her parents, both former athletes, sent Yoky to the United States, with the hope of her becoming a professional tennis player.

YOKY MATSUOKA: I was really pushing and playing a lot of tennis—maybe three and a half hours of tennis and one hour conditioning every day.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: And at her new high school, in Palm Bay, Florida, she tried hard to fit in. She studied the show Friends for hours on end, to learn English and how to act like the perfect American girl. She even changed the spelling of her name.

YOKY MATSUOKA: My real name was Yoko. And I often got expressions saying, "Oh you're Yoko, just like Yoko Ono." And I changed my last letter from o to y, to "Yoky."

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Yoky was fitting in, but when she began to do well in math and science, she started to stand out in a way she didn't like.

YOKY MATSUOKA: Whenever I received an award, whether it's a science award or a math award, my friends would come over and say, "You got an award, so you are smart?" And then I would say, "No, no. That's just a mistake. I don't know anything about it. I don't know what they're thinking, but since they're going to give me an award, I'll just take it."

It sounded like a geek or a nerd. And I just didn't want to be that. As girls, we all wanted to be accepted as pretty girls or athletic girls, not the science girls or math girls. If people perceived me as an airhead, then that gained my popularity; I get to have cool friends.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Yoky was so afraid of looking like a nerd that she wouldn't be seen carrying a book.

YOKY MATSUOKA: I even got to the point where I pretended that I was never studying and then just hid in the library for two days before the test, and then I studied. I had to live a double life. I never tried to just stop learning math and science. I just secretly did it.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: On the tennis court, Yoky was on the fast track to becoming a pro. She even reached the qualifying rounds for Wimbledon. But Yoky's body could not withstand the stress.

YOKY MATSUOKA: The first tennis injury, I sprained my ankle so bad that, basically, the bone came off with it. Since then, almost every year I had a pretty severe injury.

I broke my ankle three times, I snapped my Achilles tendon, I snapped my patella tendon, I hurt my back, I had split quad muscles.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: She secretly dreamt of creating a robotic tennis partner to help her strengthen her body and keep training through her injuries.

YOKY MATSUOKA: And I thought, well you know, "I know some science and I know some robotics. Wouldn't that be great, if I can build a robot that, you know, has multiple knobs, and said, 'Oh today, this person should have this kind of spin on the serve?' Or somebody else, who just would just not miss any balls but would not hit really hard, you know, push me just the right amount every day."

So that's really the first time I started thinking a robotic tennis player would be great.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Due to injuries, Yoky never played professional tennis. But she did get to build robots. At M.I.T., she studied under the world-famous roboticist, Rodney Brooks.

RODNEY BROOKS: So, in principle, I see no reason that we can't build a robot, eventually, that is as capable as a human being.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Like John McEnroe, Rodney was known as the bad boy in his world.

YOKY MATSUOKA: Rod is called "bad boy" of robotics because he also has an attitude. He thinks wild ideas that other people won't think of and won't accept.

RODNEY BROOKS: I went around reveling in being different and reveling in telling everyone else they were wrong.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Rodney was working on Cog, a cutting edge humanoid robot.

YOKY MATSUOKA: Different body parts were up for grab.

"Which body part would you like to work on?" And I said, "Well, you know, I'm a tennis player. I'd really like to understand more about arms and hands. So I think I'm going to work on hands."

RODNEY BROOKS: So this is the hand that Yoky built for her master's thesis. It fit along the end of an arm for Cog.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: It was the first robotic hand that Yoky ever built.

RODNEY BROOKS: Yoky used to always surprise me, because she would go into a field where she knew nothing, really, and within three or four weeks, she'd be knowing everything about it and making contributions there.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: She thrived in this new field, but Yoky was still hiding. She wouldn't even buy books because she was afraid of seeming smart.

YOKY MATSUOKA: Second year of graduate school at M.I.T., I had to put a nametag and it says "Hello my name is," and I was supposed to put "Yoky" on it. But I thought it would be really cool if I put "Airhead." I looked around at everybody's faces, and I didn't see all positive like, "Yeah, girl. Go girl!"

My advisor, Rod Brooks, came and, basically, pulled me on the side and said, "Look, Yoky. This is not going well. Stop acting like an airhead. It's not going to take you far, as long as you're acting this way." And that's the day that it really hit me hard and thought, "Wow. Now I understand. Okay, I'm going to stop doing this. Acting airhead is not the right dual life that I should be living in anymore." That was one of the few turning points in my life.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Now, 10 years later, Yoky has her own lab at the University of Washington and is working on a new robotic hand. Except this time, it's a robotic hand for humans.

YOKY MATSUOKA: Hand is really amazing. Hands set us apart from other species. You know we built this society because we can use tools. So that means that people who are disabled and can't use their hands, they're not given back this full human capability. I really want to give that function back to those people.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Yoky is building a prosthetic hand that will look and move exactly like a real human hand.

BRIAN DELLON (University of Washington): The index finger, for example, has seven muscles. That means we need seven motors to control and make it work exactly like a human finger would. When the motor moves, it pulls these strings, just like a puppet, and the finger will then move in the correct way.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: They use infrared cameras to track exactly how the muscles in the hand move.

BRIAN DELLON: We put reflective markers on an object, say, your finger.

YOKY MATSUOKA: As I move my finger and record the motion itself, I can play that back using my robotic finger.

So if I curl my knuckle joint, then I can make the robot to curl the knuckle joint the same way.

BRIAN DELLON: As you tense and release your muscles, they actually generate electrical activity, and so we're trying to tease out the some of different ways the brain controls our fingers and our muscles, as we're trying to do a certain task.

YOKY MATSUOKA: One day, people are going to be walking around with a prosthetic hand, which...nobody can tell it's prosthetic. It moves like it, it looks like it, it's controlled naturally from the brain. That's how it's going to be.

I really wanted to be somebody who sticks out, be different, have an attitude. If people say, "Hey, you have an attitude," I think, to me, that's a compliment.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: And with her mathematician husband, Simon, Yoky lives this attitude both inside and outside her lab.

YOKY MATSUOKA: I am the first generation who is openly having this dual life and saying, "You know what? I'm not going to wait 'til tenure. I'm going to start having my kids." And it's really exciting, but it's really, really hard.

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: Using her MacArthur "genius" award money, Yoky's on a mission to pave the way for the next generation of women in science.

YOKY MATSUOKA: What I really would like to do is to change the image of math and science. And if I could really change that image, then it's okay to be smart. And it's okay to be a girl and then still be able to pursue math and science, and it's accepted.

I'd like to be role model, and I want them to see that that's what I'm doing, and to achieve that and then do better than me.

On Screen Text: Meet Ambroise Pare, 16th century military surgeon. These are illustrations from a book, published in 1585, showing his designs for functional prosthetic limbs. One actually featured moving gears and levers to allow grasping.

Let's give him a big hand.

COSMIC PERSPECTIVE – BAD NEWS

NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON: And now for some final thoughts on bad news.

Many people fear new information that might contain bad news beyond their control. But to fear bad news by hiding from it forfeits any opportunity to solve the problem.

Suppose the enterprise of science shunned bad news. We would never cure disease or mitigate disaster. We would crouch with our head in the sand, ceding our fate to forces we imagine to be beyond our control.

Take killer asteroids, for example. Without a space program, we could pretend they're not there or we might run away from where they might strike.

But I'd much rather learn all I can about these objects, and then figure out a way to deflect them.

Even worse than bad news, for some people, is uncertainty, not knowing something for sure makes them uncomfortable. They just have to have the answer, the exact answer.

But to the scientist, uncertainty is a call to the wild. That's where data are in greatest need of improvement along the way to fully developed theories and experiments that have shed their shrouds of uncertainty.

For some cases, especially your health, you can actually influence the uncertainty yourself. If you wear a seatbelt, your chances of surviving a high-speed car accident are much higher than if you don't. And if you exercise and eat well, you can stave off diseases that you might be genetically prone to contract.

So, bad news, uncertainty? I say, bring it on. To a person engaged in discovery, all information is good, even when it's bad.

And that is the cosmic perspective.

And now we'd like to hear your perspective on 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 audio and video podcasts, hear from experts and much more. Find us at PBS.org. That's our show. We'll see you next time.

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And the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to enhance public understanding of science and technology and to portray the lives of men and women engaged in scientific and technological pursuit.

And the George D. Smith Fund.

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