Science Friday Folgen

We look into the engineering reasons why the Francis Scott Key bridge collapsed after a ship crashed into it. Also, a new analysis finds that more viruses spread from humans to animals than from animals to humans.The Engineering Behind Why The Bridge In Baltimore CollapsedOn Tuesday, a large section of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key bridge collapsed after an enormous container ship lost power and collided with the structure. Two people were rescued from the water, two bodies were recovered, and four others are unaccounted for and presumed dead.The structural failure of the bridge, which cut off a key roadway and a major international shipping port, has many wondering why this happened. Does the fault lie in aging infrastructure or in the manner the container ship struck one of the bridge’s main supports?Guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross talks to journalist Swapna Krishna about the engineering reasons behind why the bridge collapsed and other top stories in science this week, including rockets NASA is launching during next week’s solar eclipse, new research about how Homo sapiens traveled out of Africa, and visualizing the magnetic field of the black hole at the center of our galaxy.Mapping Out How Viruses Jump Between SpeciesIn the world of emerging infectious diseases, one of the looming threats comes from the so-called zoonotic diseases—pathogens that somehow make the jump from an animal host to a human one. This includes pathogens such as COVID-19 and avian influenza, a.k.a. bird flu, which can sometimes cross the species divide. But a new analysis published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution finds that when it comes to viruses, more viral species appear to have jumped from humans to animals than the other way around. And even more cases of interspecies transmission don’t involve humans at all.Cedric Tan, a PhD student in the University College London Genetics Institute and Francis Crick Institute, joins guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross to talk about the analysis, and what it tells us about our place in a global web of viruses.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

It wasn’t that long ago that scientists didn’t think animals could rival humans in terms of intelligence, emotions, or empathy. But the groundbreaking work of Dr. Frans de Waal helped change all of that. De Waal spent his life studying the lives of animals — especially our closest cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos.The primatologist died last week at the age of 75, and we wanted to remember him by sharing one of our favorite conversations with him on the show. It’s from 2019, when he published his book Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves.In it, he tells the story of a female chimp who didn’t produce enough milk to feed her young. When de Waal taught her to feed her baby with a bottle instead, she repaid him with what most of us would recognize as gratitude: holding both of his hands, and whimpering sadly if he tried to leave.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Ever since we learned that an asteroid slammed into Earth, wiped out the dinosaurs, and changed the course of life on this planet, scientists have wondered if it could happen again. It turns out there is an asteroid, called Bennu, that has a very small chance of colliding with our planet in the year 2182.But beyond that, Bennu could hold information that would help unlock our solar system’s secrets, like how it began and where life originated. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission launched in 2016 to collect a sample from Bennu. It was successful, and this past fall, the spacecraft safely delivered its asteroid sample to scientists waiting on Earth.In a new memoir, The Asteroid Hunter: A Scientist’s Journey to the Dawn of our Solar System, Dr. Dante Lauretta, principal investigator of OSIRIS-REx, gives readers a behind-the-scenes account on this high-stakes mission.Ira talks with Dr. Lauretta, a planetary scientist at University of Arizona in Tucson, about why he chose to study Bennu, what it was like to run such a nail-biting mission, and what Bennu could reveal about our galaxy.Read an excerpt from The Asteroid Hunter.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.