Newton's Apple; No. 1005

You're invited to a birthday bash. It's a high energy of him. This is Raymond Burr. My congratulations to Newton's Apple on 10 years of making science fun. Newton's Apple is made possible by a grant from 3M, encouraging innovative ways of looking at the world around us. 3M, innovation, working for you. And now, here's your host, David Hyatt.

Thank you. Welcome. Thank you very much. Welcome to Newton's Apple. The program that answers your questions about science, technology, and the world around us. Our first question comes from Matthew Stark of Fairbanks, Alaska, who writes, Our demand for oil has produced an alarming trade-off, oil spills. What strategies are being developed to reduce their risk? It's a very important question. We send our field reporter, Piggy Nap, to Valdez, Alaska, and the site of the worst oil spill in US history to help find an answer to Matthew's question. Alaska produces one-fifth of all the oil pumped out of the United States. Every day, two million barrels of oil passed through these narrow channels. Due to heavy tanker traffic and unpredictable weather,

environmentalists are concerned that oil transport in this area is an accident waiting to happen. At first glance, there's no sign of the huge oil spill that darken the waters of Prince William's sound. But scientists and researchers are still trying to understand and restore the ecological balance here. And giant tankers continue to arrive in Valdez to pick up and transport oil all over the world. In this town, oil spill prevention is a primary concern. Radio reports indicated that oil had once again spilled into the waters of Prince William's sound. Okay, and how much do you know so far of what is going on? Good morning. My name is Bob Williams.

I'm a public affairs manager for Sherron, Alaska. It was a Sherron vessel, Mississippi, that had the accident, one AM this morning. We lost between 55,000 and 60,000 barrels of oil. We're still investigating the source of gas. We've recorded the size of the slick as of about 0800. An oil spill is an unnatural disaster, and coordinating a cleanup response is an organizational nightmare. An enormous network of scientists and researchers from all over were busily engaged in the cleanup response. So I headed for the harbor, where I tracked down Ron Britain, a biologist who coordinates spill response efforts. The things that we're looking at are very, very complex. It depends on where the oil was spilled, how much was spilled, and a lot of the meteorological conditions, and a lot of the biological conditions. Meteorological being that the currents and the wind can drive the oil. Once oil escapes from a tanker, bad weather and gusting winds can double the size of a spill in a matter of hours. Oil and water clearly do not mix, and oil is less dense, so it floats on the surface.

And there's a process called a mulsification, where the water becomes a part of the oil. The oil is gradually broken up by the wave action and the wind action, and it forms what's called a moose, because it looks like a chocolate moose. Containing the oil is the key to minimizing damage. Once the coast guard's been notified of a spill, equipment specialists from Ali Eska Pipeline Service go to work, surrounding the slick with something known as a boom. Engineer Bruce Painter explained the basics of how a boom works. The easiest way I can describe this is if you can imagine a 1,600-foot slinky encased in plastic. While it's rolled up on the reel, the springs lay flat. And as it's being launched, they begin to stand up and itself inflates. Oh, that's great. So you don't have to pump air into it, and that's what makes it very fast. Under ideal conditions, you can have this boom often in the water within 10 minutes. Booms are designed to prevent the spill from spreading. While the inflated portion of the boom floats on top of the water, its skirt extends below, trapping oil so it won't spread beyond the boom.

It took us two hours to reach the site. There were boats of all shapes and sizes everywhere, and plenty of booms in the water. But as you might have noticed, there's no trace of oil. This whole operation is a drill. I boarded the on-site command ship in search of Captain John Clepper. That's the demo for the dispersion. I understood it. I'm starting to rig up now. It's not going to check. His ship, the Heritage Service, directs and monitors the entire seagoing task force. Now, we're all here to do the same thing. We want to prevent the oil from getting in the water in the first place. The best way to do that is to have our people practice. Now, staging a mock oil spill might seem like an extravagant exercise. But it's a drop in the bucket when you consider Exxon spent over $2 billion to clean up the Valdez spill. Could I have an ETS? Once booms are in place, machines called skimmers are used to siphon the oil off the water's surface. Think of it as a giant seaworthy vacuum cleaner. It pumps oil into a ship's holding tank and returns cleaned water to the sea.

But frequently, booms and skimmers aren't enough. They sometimes try inside to burning. Inside to burning is the on-site igniting and burning of oil. One task force is in standby awaiting a permit approval to use inside to burning, which is a method of oxidizing the oil that's on the water and releasing it, getting it cleaned up effectively. Burning oil requires using special fireproof booms. The oil is towed downwind of the ship and ignited. This method rapidly removes large quantities of oil from the water and I mean in a hurry. Inside to burning eliminated an estimated 15 to 30,000 gallons of crude oil in 45 minutes during the Valdez crisis. But there's an obvious trade-off. Air pollution. Many environmentalists believe it's the lesser of two evils, preferable to the longer lasting impact on the environment, if oil reaches shore. In weighing cleanup options, our environment always pays a price.

Once a spill occurs, pollution is unavoidable. That's why another treatment, the use of chemical dispersants, is a carefully considered alternative. The dispersant is similar to less oil. It will make the oil break up and sink. Dispersants are chemicals that literally disperse or break up oil, preventing a giant slick from forming. They don't destroy it, they just break it up. As they're sprayed on the water, the molecules on one end of the dispersant attract oil, while molecules on the other end attract water. The molecule attracted to water is a stronger attraction, and as a result, tiny droplets of oil are dragged away into deeper water. It's obvious why pollution is a concern. Dispersants don't remove oil, they just dilute it. National Weather Service reports, KO Force wins head it this way, while I'm expected to reach shoreline two moon banks. By the time I arrived, smaller booms were being strategically placed to protect the harbor.

During Valdez, many harbors weren't protected soon enough, and oil reached the shore. Teams worked around the clock, attempting to rescue oil-covered animals. Drills test biologists' ability to quickly set up a wildlife emergency room. They need to be ready to set up medical facilities anywhere, at a moment's notice. Crates are packed with everything they'll need, antibiotics, detergent, animal carriers, surgical supplies. Veterinarian Pam Twamy's specialty is caring for sea otters. Now the stuffed animals used in this drill are cute, but oil-soaked animals in distress are anything but. Do you get otters in this small? Yes. And we had a total of 22 otter pups under five pounds admitted during the Valdez experience.

During Valdez, volunteers had to be trained to wash animals on the spot. Just a small percentage of animals treated were saved. Oil destroys the insulating quality of fur, leading to hypothermia, the inability of an animal to maintain its body temperature. They're literally freeze to death unless the oil is washed off. The sea otter has no body fat. His entire protection is his fur coat, and it is the air layer that's trapped at the bottom of this fur coat that insulates him. It's essentially a dry suit. We've paid a high price for everything we've learned from the Exxon Valdez spill. There is a certain amount of damage that has to be accepted. The amount of effort and manpower and money that's expended in these drills is phenomenal. Overall, I think if the real thing happened tomorrow, we could handle the first 48 hours and we've got a good solid foundation to keep going from there. The oil industry carries the obligation to provide safer transport of oil, but we all share the responsibility for the impact of a spill.

As long as our demand for petroleum remains high, tankers will cross the world's seas carrying cargoes of oil. Although Prince William Sound is slowly beginning to recover, every year, somewhere in the world, there's an oil spill the size of the Exxon Valdez. How many muscles do we use when we stand? Six billion muscle cells each thinner than a human hair but can support 1,000 times its own weight. They truly are pumped up. I don't usually answer my personal mail on the show,

but I got a letter recently from my mother that I just have to share with you. Dear David, you know how I hate to say anything, but do you look a little thin? Are you getting enough to eat? Mom, don't worry, I'm eating plenty, okay? But if it would make you feel any better, we've invited an expert on the show that can tell you for certain. She's Dr. Mindy Kurser, a nutritional scientist from the University of Minnesota. Welcome Mindy. Hi David. Oh, brought one of these along. Maybe that's what my mother has in mind. Let's take a look. There you go, what do you think? I think you look perfectly fine in real life, David. Although there are many people who look at these bodies and think they're perfect and aspire to them, even though there are many different types of body shapes and sizes that are perfectly healthy and acceptable. It's a little overdone for me actually, but if I did want to gain or lose weight, what would be the best way to go about it? If you wanted to gain weight, David, you need to increase the calories that you consume. Okay, that's one way to go about it, so that means eating more food. Let's say I want to gain a pound or two. For every pound that you want to gain, you need to increase your calorie consumption by 3,500 calories. More shopping at the grocery store.

That means eating more food. Why don't we take a look at some? Okay. Oh, I get my grocery card here. This will be fun. So if I was going to have a bagel for lunch, I would just pick up an extra bagel for lunch. So David, back to the bagels. You need to consume that entire basket of bagels. You've got to be kidding me. I have to eat a whole basket of bagels to get, what, 3,500 calories? That's right. Ooh, this is going to be tough. So that would mean four loaves of bread or five half gallons of milk? That's exactly right. Very big mound of lettuce. And that's right, each of the foods that we have displayed here is in a pile that equals about 3,500 calories. So what's the difference between lettuce and corn flakes that there would be such a science difference? One of the reasons is because the lettuce is about 95% water, which contribute no calories at all. Not much for weight gain, I guess. Another reason is because each of these foods contains a different amount of protein fat and carbohydrate. Is that the kind of stuff that we get on the food labels? Exactly. Why don't we take a look at one right now? So this would say for a one-cup serving of skim milk, we would have 90 calories. That's right. In addition, the food label gives us information about the protein fat, carbohydrate content, as well as vitamins and minerals.

All right. Well, given my selection here, my sense would be, if I wanted to gain weight in a hurry, I'd hit the sweets table, right? That is what many people do now. In fact, when we recommend dietary changes for weight gain or loss, we always recommend that people make selections for all of these food groups. Never 3500 calories from one food group, but many people like sweets and make choices from sweets. All right. So what's the big benefit of eating sweets if there were any? Well, if you want to gain weight, there's certainly very high calorie foods. And in fact, for the given weight, they tend to be higher calorie than many of the other foods we see, because they're quite high in fat. And fat contributes twice as many calories per a given weight than protein or carbohydrate. Now, we're using a term here that we're going to have to step back and define, I think. What exactly is a calorie? A calorie, David, is a unit of energy. Why don't we take a look at exactly how we measure the calorie content of a food? This is an oxygen bomb calorimeter, David. We use this piece of equipment to measure the calorie content of a food as heat energy, which is given off when the food is burned completely. So you, in this case, be burning what are these brand flakes?

That's exactly right. Here we have a pile of brand flakes, which have been ground up and pressed into a pellet. The pellet is placed inside the bomb calorimeter, and then the pellet is burned completely. The heat given off is detected and converted to calories, which we see on this graph over here. How would we go about measuring the burning of calories in our own body? Why don't we take a look at that over at the exercise cycle? Now, just as we require oxygen to burn the food in the bomb calorimeter, our body also requires oxygen to burn fuel. Okay, so the more we exercise, the more oxygen we take in, and the more calories we're burning? That's exactly right. Why don't you go ahead and sit on the exercise cycle and rest for a moment? That I can do. Even while you're resting, you're burning calories for the pumping of blood and breathing, et cetera. If we take this mouthpiece and you place it in your mouth completely, we need to put the nose clips on so that you don't expire any air except into the apparatus. Now, this machine actually measures the oxygen that you use and is able to convert that oxygen into calories that you're expending per minute while you're doing an activity.

Right now, you're resting and the machine is measuring your resting metabolism. If you'll pedal the bicycle, we can see what kind of calories per minute you burn while you're doing some work. Now, if you keep the RPMs up to about 50 RPMs, we can take a look at the graph and see that your calorie per minute expenditure while you're biking is up over 10 calories per minute. If we increase your tension on the bicycle a little bit more and make you work a little bit harder, it's quite difficult. Your expended calories actually goes up to possibly around 15 calories per minute. If you were able to sustain this kind of activity for an hour, you could be burning 600 to 900 calories per hour. Why don't you take a rest now, David? Besides having a sore nose, huh? Well, I begin to see that this is quite an energy cycle here, isn't it? It's a whole process if we consume the food in our diet. It's got a certain amount of calories in it. The one way to burn those calories off is through exercise, then. That's true.

It's all a balance of intake, the amount of food that you consume and the amount that you burn through activity and your metabolic rate. Now, in my particular case, I don't gain or lose weight very easily at all, no matter what I do with diet or exercise. What about the folks that do go up and down? David, there is such a variability in energy requirement and there seems to be a strong genetic component. There's certain people who have a certain physiology such that they seem to be meant to be bigger people. Now, certainly for people who are very, very overweight, there may be health risks associated with that and those people should be concerned about it. But there are so many people who struggle with losing 10 or 20 pounds of weight and go up and down, up and down, up and down. And this is actually very harmful. These people might be better off accepting themselves and not struggling against their bodies to try to lose that weight. And going back to some of the basics that we already know, balanced diets, regular exercise, things like that. That's the best advice we can give anyone. Many thanks so much for your advice today. It's been great. You're quite welcome.

I've got a very big basket of bagels to take care of. We'll have more in just a minute. Got a question? Right to Newton's Apple at 172 East 4th Street, Box 1000, St. Paul, Minnesota 55101. Drop us a line. So join us now for another episode of Science of the Rich and Famous. So let your head down and go on and cry. Hey, Crystal Gale. Don't scare a girl like that. How'd you get past Larry? Will you sign my autograph book?

I do have a show, but okay. Why? What beautiful hair you have. How long did it take to grow so long? How long did it take you to come up with such an original question? I can tell you a lot about hair. Don't get me started about hair. Okay. For the average person, hair grows a little over a hundredth of an inch a day, almost six inches a year. Mine grows a bit faster, judging by all this. What, a little over five feet? I'd say it took me six to seven years. Give it a take a month. Your hair, it's so vibrant. Well, thank you. It's really quite dead. What? Yes. It's only alive at the root. You could see I'm a mortician, caring for the dead. And it takes a lot of care, believe me. Here, look closely. No, closer than that. Every strand of hair is anchored to your head by a follicle and cytopore. And each follicle has an oil gland that moistence the follicle and lubricates the hair and scalp. The oil keeps everything from drying out, but it also collects bacteria and dirt. So it needs some help.

In my case, a lot of help. Now, you've seen the shampoo ads that promise to nourish and revitalize your hair. Well, a good shampoo can help hair keep its texture and prevent moisture loss, but it can't really raise the dead. Rubbing your scalp when you shampoo does the most to nourish your hair, because that's where the feeding is going on. It's where hair is born. The hair follicle is nourished by blood vessels, which carry amino acids, the building blocks of protein. The follicle grows new hair cells, which push the older cells up. As the cells move up, the nucleus dies. And the amino acids inside join up in chains. The cell walls disappear, and the amino acid chains attach to each other with chemical bonds, and start to twist and braid around each other, forming hard, protein fibers. The protein fibers join up with other protein fibers into this long, rope-like structure called hair. It's an amazing design. Strong, yet flexible. Wow! Look at this!

It's okay. In fact, it's perfectly normal. The average person sheds 25 to 100 hairs a day, but never fear. The same pores will budden grow new hair follicles in their place, and those little guys should have a long way to grow. So what's my secret? Protein. Hair needs a lot of protein. High-left tuna. What about? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Welcome to this week's Science Trial. We're under pressure in today's game, and the players include a plastic bottle filled with water, a plastic pentop, and some modeling clay. And there's the whistle. A piece of clay is stuck to the pentop. The top is placed inside the bottle, and the bottle is being sealed tight. The pentop is floating inside. Now, the sides of the bottle are squeezed, but wait, the timeout's been called. Let's go to the Super Science Breakdown. Squeezing the bottle increases the pressure inside, and forces water into the pentop.

This water compresses the air trapped inside of the cap. But won't this extra water also increase the weight of it? To find out, you'll have to... Do these antlers look familiar? No, they don't belong to a giant deer, or a small moose. But if you guess Santa's reindeer, you'd almost be right. These antlers come from caribou, the North American cousin of reindeer. When Peggy was in Alaska, she met a whole herd of caribou at the Arctic Biological Research Farm in Fairbanks. Who would have thought that a university would have a farm full of caribou? But there they were. With a bucket of their favorite food, Lycan, I had no trouble making friends. Ooh, they like Lycan. I wanted to learn about the features caribou have developed to survive in the Arctic. I got a hold of Bob White, a professor at the Institute of Arctic Biology. You tell me about some of the adaptations that this animal has made to live in this harsh place. The first and most obvious adaptation is to be able to put up with cold.

I mean, that's the driving part of the environment in winter time. And they have a coat that allows them to keep warm. All deer have the same kind of fiber. It's a very, very long hollow hair fiber that is very insulative. And then beneath that hair coat is a layer of a finer wool against the skin. And the wool is very exothermic. That means if it gets a little bit wet, it gives out heat as it gets wet. And so it keeps the skin surface of the animal quite warm. The second thing is you have to find food during the worst part of the year. And finding food is the secret to who survived. The caribou's secret is lycan. These little fungus-like plants cover much of the ground surface in the Arctic. No other animal can digest lycan as efficiently as caribou. So how do they find it and how do they get to it? Finding a lycan supply is essentially being able to smell through the snow. Lycans have a very distinctive set of aromas.

And caribou can detect those aromas through snow up to about two or three meters deep. And they have the ability to crater that deep in order, dig a feeding crater in order to get down to the food resource to do it. And they have these great big feet that they use just like shovels. Their wide feet also act as snowshoes, so caribou can walk on top of the deep snow. And if you listen carefully, you can hear their feet click when they walk. The clicking helps the caribou to keep track of other herd members at night or in heavy fog. They need that help because they're almost always on the move. They're moving fairly quickly through the areas so that each animal is coming across fresh material to eat all the time. And when there's thousands of animals around, it's more a local competition for food as they move along. One animal moving along spots food eats it, then moves to the next spot, hot spot of feed feeding. And so the animals are kind of competing with each other and move along quite fast as they compete for food.

Caribou cover a lot of territory, moving between winter and summer feeding ranges and the calving grounds in spring. Caribou give birth at the one time of the year when they're safe from wolves, their main predator. It's the same time the wolf packs are busy with their own offspring. The timing of migration in spring to the calving grounds is an incredibly predictable event. They must arrive within a two to three day period each year on the calving grounds in order to calm down under optimum conditions and ensure that those calves survive. What about their numbers? Are they threatened? They're certainly not threatened now. However, in interior Alaska at the moment, all of the populations are declining quite markedly. And one must start to ask questions about what's changed in the environment that that's occurred. So because things are warming up?

Because things are warming up, yes. Warm summers are basically not really good for caribou. There are indications that global warming might be slowing the growth of the plants that caribou eat. It's a warning sign not just for the caribou, but for all of us who share this fragile planet. Join us again next week on Newton's Apple. Newton's Apple is made possible by a grant from three M and its employees dedicated to innovative thinking and scientific learning, three M, innovation working for you. This is PBS.